Lara Espírito Santo grew up shuttling between Rio de Janeiro and her father’s industrial farms in Paraguay and Brazil, traded a planned career in politics and international development for a kitchen job at Silo in London, and went on to co-found SEM, the zero-food-waste restaurant in Lisbon she ran with her partner George McLeod until closing it ten days before this conversation (not for financial reasons, but to figure out what comes next).

Source the cream instead of buying butter, and one ingredient quietly becomes four: butter, buttermilk, then whey and cheese once you split the buttermilk again. That unglamorous bit of dairy chemistry is the mechanic behind Lara’s central claim: you don’t get to zero food waste by managing waste better. You get there by going further back up the supply chain than most kitchens ever bother to look, and only then does the creativity actually start.

In this episode, recorded in central Lisbon, with the usual scattering of planes overhead, we get into how watching the birds disappear from her father’s 20,000-hectare farm pushed her toward activism and then back into restaurants, why SEM’s food costs ran at 17%, against an industry standard of 25–30%, why she closed it anyway, the case for an EU-wide black market in regeneratively raised organ meat, oyster shells turned into dinner plates, and why she’d spend a hypothetical billion euros de-risking the years it takes a farm to convert.

GROWING UP ON A 20,000-HECTARE FARM, AND WATCHING THE BIRDS DISAPPEAR

Lara grew up between two worlds. Her Brazilian mother and Portuguese father split her early years between Rio de Janeiro and the large-scale industrial farms — mostly monoculture crops and extensive cattle ranching — that her father managed across Brazil and Paraguay. One favourite, a 20,000-hectare irrigated rice and cattle farm between the Amazon and the Pantanal, gave her a front-row seat to both abundance and its loss: as a young child she remembers driving through landscapes thick with birds, caimans, anteaters, and pythons; by the time she returned at fourteen or fifteen, the birds had gone quiet. Watching that degradation happen within a single childhood pushed her away from agriculture and into politics and international development instead .

“I have this kind of super vivid memory of this really privileged childhood… and I remember the last time I went, which was when I was about fourteen, fifteen, and you couldn’t see a single bird. In a timeframe of my childhood and adolescence, I saw that degradation happen really fast.” — Lara Espirito Santo

FROM SYSTEMS-CHANGE ACTIVISM TO COOKING SCHOOL: WHY SHE PICKED RESTAURANTS

Studying politics and international development, then working on social and environmental projects in Brazil, Lara felt unhappy and worried that switching to food, her real passion, meant giving up on the large-scale systems change she’d set out to pursue. That changed the moment she got into a kitchen. At cooking school in London, the sheer scale of repeated, identical orders going to waste connected straight back to the monocultures she’d grown up around. Her first job, in a hotel restaurant, sharpened the picture further: marketing teams posing with photos of soil-fresh carrots that had, in reality, sat in a walk-in fridge for weeks. Many sustainability claims with no one to verify them. The one place that gave her hope was Silo in London, the zero-waste restaurant founded by Douglas McMaster.

“I always felt lost without the how and that was my how. I always had the why.” — Lara Espirito Santo

ABUNDANCE

When a restaurant commits to using every part of an ingredient, it unlocks unexpected value. By sourcing primary products directly, a chef can transform what would be byproducts into multiple distinct ingredients. This creates a cascade of resources from a single source.

“If you can source the cream, you actually have four products from the butter: you have the cream, which you then split, and you have butter and buttermilk. If you split the buttermilk again, you have whey and cheese. So, then you have suddenly four products within just sourcing this one primary product.” — Lara Espirito Santo

CREATIVITY

Limitations often spark the most innovative thinking. In a kitchen without waste, every peel, seed, and scrap becomes an opportunity. This constraint forces chefs to abandon conventional recipes and discover new culinary paths.

“When you can’t throw carrot peels away, you start thinking of a hundred things that you can do with carrot peels, and you start thinking outside these established paths.” — Lara Espirito Santo

WHY FLAVOUR IS THE NON-NEGOTIABLE

All the sourcing rigour in the world doesn’t matter if the food doesn’t taste good and Lara is wary of a narrative she sees creep into both kitchens and finance: that sustainable automatically means a smaller, less satisfying version of the thing. People come back, and bring friends, only if the food is genuinely delicious; without that, zero waste stays a curiosity for a handful of pioneers instead of a model that scales.

“You’re always creating flavour, which is why being delicious is so important. This is the driver in the end. Unless it tastes amazing, it has to be an explosion, or it’s never going to scale to whoever sits around us.” — Lara Espirito Santo

REGENERATIVE SOURCING, WHEN DONE WELL, FIXES THE FOOD WASTE

The link between how food is grown and how much is thrown away is often overlooked. Short supply chains and direct relationships with farmers eliminate the need for excess processing and packaging. When sourcing is done right, waste is designed out from the start.

“When you have that really short supply chain, you’re actually talking straight to farmers and producers and the ones doing, working with nature. So, the kind of working with a non-industrial system, would be what makes zero waste possible.” — Lara Espirito Santo

WHY DID THEY CLOSE SEM?

A restaurant that pushed the boundaries of zero waste and regenerative sourcing recently closed its doors, but it wasn’t because of the numbers. Sem’s average food cost over two and a half years ran at 17%, well under the 25–30% industry standard for independent restaurants, thanks to a fixed tasting menu that gave the kitchen precise portion control and the flexibility to keep sourcing only from its small group of partner farms. The decision to close came from somewhere else entirely: personal life changes, with the founders choosing to prioritize family and a different pace of life.

“It wasn’t for financial reasons, it was more personal, life-changing reasons, more of a decision of mine and George’s to want to be in a less urban setting, now that the family’s growing.” — Lara Espirito Santo

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SEM?

Though one chapter has closed, the vision continues to evolve. The team is now exploring how to expand their operating model beyond a single restaurant. Ideas include larger kitchens, horizontal collaboration, and working with invasive species and wild foods, like the Iberian dune berry that vanishes by the millions every time a new beachfront hotel goes up, but could instead be protected, harvested, and put back on the menu.

“We have ideas of what’s next, and it’s partly kind of thinking how do you expand on these foundations that SEM not only was built on but evolved into these kind of pillars that became very part of our operating model.” — Lara Espirito Santo

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

Koen and Lara also talked about:

• Turning oyster shells into plates — when Winnow waste-tracking system showed oyster shells made up roughly 30% of weekly food waste by weight, the team worked with a local materials lab to turn them into tableware instead of compost
• True cost accounting. Lara’s magic-wand answer: pricing in the externalised costs of industrial food (health, taxes, future generations) would make regenerative agriculture the obvious, inevitable choice, not a debate
• Conversion period risk. Her $1 billion answer: de-risking the multi-year transition for farmers, including “farms in conversion” labelling that lets consumers invest in a farm’s transition story before it’s certified
• Missing infrastructure. Too few independent slaughterhouses and distribution networks, which blocks restaurants from accessing full carcasses from the regenerative farms they already work with, and feeds a black market for organ meat from regeneratively raised animals

LINKS:

• SEM restaurant
• SEM instagram account

RELATED INTERVIEWS:

• Matt Orlando – From Noma to building the world’s most circular restaurant and disrupting the chocolate industry
• Chris Locke – Fermentation is the key ingredient for a zero-waste restaurant and the future of food
• Daniel Vidal – Zero-waste fine dining with deep ancestral Mexican roots
• Andres Jara – How a chef-butcher-farmer turned legumes into a scalable, clean-label food that rewards farmers
• Anthony Myint – Sourcing better isn’t going to change the food system, award-winning chef might have the silver bullet for system change
• Dan Barber – AI-Powered natural breeding: The End of GMOs, Gene Editing, and CRISPR?
• Dan Barber, great flavour, health benefits and healthy ecosystems can only come from healthy soils not a lab

More about our guest:
Lara Espirito Santo is a strategic consultant, lecturer and writer on food sustainability as well as the founder and owner of SEM Restaurant & Wine Bar in Lisbon, now SEM fora. She is a passionate chef and entrepreneur with Master in Poverty and Development and over ten years experience working with sustainability and social impact.

——————————————

Feedback, comments, suggestions? Reach me via Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, in the comments below or through Get in Touch on this website.

Join the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P

The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.