The future “prepared on site” label on restaurant menus will coexist at least for a time with the current “homemade” label, Minister for SMEs Olivia Grégoire indicated this Monday in front of professionals in the sector. “The objective is simple: to guarantee more fairness to restaurateurs, to guarantee better information to consumers,” she told the members of the Group of Hotels and Restaurants of France (GHR) gathered at a conference.
“This project will get underway. We will have to make the homemade and the prepared on site coexist – but only for a while, let’s be clear – she explained. “We aim to promote “prepared on site”. I have a challenge, not to make the same mistakes as with “homemade” because “by cramming in all the requests, the specificities, the possible and imaginable exceptions (…) we arrive to definitions that are impossible,” she lamented. “We will have to define together “prepared on site”, and above all which is applicable to you, because “homemade” as we have constructed it, with all the exceptions and specificities, is inapplicable. . There, the objective will be much simpler,” she assured.
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The minister also expressed the wish to “experiment, perhaps in a region, Île-de-France at random, the “prepared on site” during the Olympic and Paralympic Games”, taking care not to “ “rush” the profession. “These Olympic Games must also be a showcase of gastronomy, know-how, and the French art of living. We must be the best possible hosts and that depends only on you,” added Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire to Congress.
For the launch of this future label, “there is no question of doing this by deciding only from Bercy. We are launching a work of reflection, with the objective of achieving implementation in the coming months. It will take time because there are a lot of issues behind it,” added the minister. For their part, the GHR restaurateurs, who share the observation of a “homemade” label “which does not work”, believe that “the time has come to revise the technical elements” by accepting that labeled preparations include blanched vegetables or dehydrated mushrooms, recalled the president of the group Didier Chenet.