top of page
Azores Essentials
Our Commitment to Sustainability
Please see below for how we feel we are addressing the key concepts of the Sustainability Development Goals
We are both Biologists and educators with wide experience across biology. We take a One Health approach whereby we promote the health of ecosystems, organisms and humans as a reduction in the health of any one of those players will be detrimental to the others.
We promote healthy eating using produce of known provenance together with our knowledge of healthy eating, focussing on small Azorean producers where we can and with constant dialogue between ourselves and our producers we are able to make decisions on food quality.
We promote wellness in all of its senses and aim to educate our guests in the composition and properties of everything that we serve.
As educators with well over 50 years of education experience from secondary school to post-graduate level between us, we are committed to quality education. Our broad backgrounds allow us to be able to educate our clients in a range of subjects as a part of our experiences. We actively promote visits from educational establishments and we regularly visit schools and universities to run workshops. We work very closely with the school teachers association on the Azores and the profits from a recent event were sent to one of the schools affected by the devastation caused by bad weather in mainland Portugal early in 2026. We also advise many students on an Ad Hoc basis from our knowledge.
We are still actively researching a number of aspects related with the business and hope to be able to produce publications relevant to that in the near future.
Paula is the CEO and force behind Azores Essentials running the company almost single handedly as a female entrepreneur. Many of our amazing small producers are also from female-led companies or single person businesses. We are an LGBTQ+ friendly space.
Water is the substance that defines what we do and is a constant theme for us. Through our water tastings and other services using waters, we aim to educate our clients on what the real meaning of clean water is. With our backgrounds in microbiology, biochemistry and toxicology that extend way beyond just drinking water, we are in a unique position to be able to do that. We work very closely with our collaborators in the mineral water industry together with suppliers who use mineral waters for different goals. We also have provided our specialist advice to other companies who use the thermal waters commercially.
We love sustainability. Whether that be through the use of local and seasonal ingredients or reusing what others might call waste products to make new ingredients and dishes . We are also very aware of globalisation and we really try to source ingredients from small independent producers where we can. This can take a lot of work but we would prefer to have a locally sourced product than something that is available whenever we want. We have spent a lot of time sourcing new ingredients across the archipelago which helps to ensure jobs and income in our very small producers. This has translated into a huge network of contacts that we are more than happy to share with our clients as they travel around the archipelago to keep a circular economy within the islands.
This is one of the core fundaments of Azores Essentials. Aside from a small number of core ingredients like wheat flour that we are unable to source from the archipelago, we use Azorean, local ingredients as much as we can in order to reduce our footprint. This does mean that sometimes we cannot offer certain products because they are not in season or not available for other reasons. We embrace this rather than seeing it as a problem. We try to work as much as possible on a circular economy and all of our biological waste is reused in some way either as chicken food for fresh vegetable waste or as compost in terms of the coffee grounds that we do not reuse for cakes. We reuse much of our fruit and vegetable waste to generate new dishes and preserves, vastly reducing our waste impact
We are as carbon neutral as we can be and carbon positive where possible, particularly in our Geothermal menus that use only natural heat sources in their cooking as well as the natural mineral waters of Furnas. By sourcing our ingredients from within the island and the archipelago for c. 90% of our produce, we massively reduce our footprint in a geographically complex area to be able to do that and we try to use seasonal and local fresh ingredients where possible, not afraid of not being able to serve certain dishes for up to 8 months of the year. Our Geothermal Cooking knowledge allows us to to serve an entire menu cooked without the use of electricity or gas and with waters that require zero carbon output (OK, walking up the hill with bottles in hand generates some but not much compared to treatment plants).
We are very aware of water and our backgrounds are testament to that, Paula having worked mostly on Sea and Geothermal waters and Rich more on fresh waters. We have an in-depth understanding of the interplay between the requirements of the various stakeholders and the overall outcome in terms of biological systems and water quality. We actively advise on the use of geothermal waters in particular and we have many collaborations within the water industry in Furnas and beyond as well as being qualified water sommeliers. We contribute regularly to international events based around waters.
We are fundamentally aware our impact as humans on the terrestrial environment as given by our backgrounds in Ecology. We are also very aware of the issues related with our geography, particularly related to invasive (mostly plant) species. We have worked to try to incorporate the use of invasive species into our menus as much as we can. From Teas to wrapping fish for cooking, we are trying to educate in how invasive species can be used practically in order to control their spread.
We are active members of Terras do Priôlo and the European Charter for Sustainable Tourism (CETS) for that often offering our produce for free at their meetings. We have both completed the Interpret Europe interpretative guiding course in Sustainable Tourism
We have also organised sessions removing invasive plants from some of the worst affected areas.
bottom of page