Short-term impacts of sustainable certifications on Horeca sector businesses : the Michelin Green Star case

Abstract

While literature discusses sustainability certifications in the Horeca sector across Popularity, Green reputation, and Economic performance, existing empirical studies are based on customer intention rather than actual behaviour, calling for additional quantitative analysis. To address this gap, this study provides a short-term impacts analysis on a sample of 128 European Restaurants awarded with the green Michelin star between 2020 and 2024, investigating how the certification affects the three macro areas, and the existence of cross-area relationships. Seven variables were extracted from Google Maps, Google Trends, Orbis, and APIs, distributed across the three macro-areas. The analysis adopts two analytical logics: Panel Fixed Effects and Random Effects regression models, and descriptive time-variation analysis. Results identify a significant relationship of certification with Customer attention and Total production, as well as a significant relationship between Online content and Total production. All analyses fail to find a significant relationship with Green Reputation variables. Literature suggests two main interpretations of this result: first, these awarded restaurants already enjoy exceptionally high prestige, leaving little room for further reputational gains, and second, consumers in the fine-dining sector assign a relatively lower emphasis to sustainability compared to the gastronomic experience itself. Lastly, the analysis reveals that customer-driven variables are more responsive and methodologically effective in capturing sustainability-related effects than business-driven metrics, which suffer from excessive statistical noise caused by external confounding factors, to which SMEs are particularly susceptible, risking obscuring empirical findings.