Hotel Chain Bans Bacon, Kills Breakfast Joy
No bacon, no peace! Hotel guests aren’t entirely onboard with a Scandinavian chain’s healthy new menu. (Photo: iStock/adlifemarketing)
Could the bacon trend finally be winding down? It is in Scandinavia, at least, where Comfort Hotels has just announced that the salty snack will be removed from its breakfast menus.
The goal isn’t to incite riots among travelers (which is conceivable; customers are already complaining). Instead, the mission is to make the hotels’ cuisine healthier and more environmentally sustainable. To that end, cereals and cheeses that contain palm oil — the harvest of which contributes to rain forest destruction — are also being removed. Sausages are off the menu too.
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The decision comes from Comfort Hotels owner Petter Stordalen, the Norwegian billionaire who owns Nordic Choice Hotels, one of the largest hotel chains in Scandinavia.
You could chalk the bacon ban up to Stordalen’s being an eccentric — and he certainly is that (what billionaire isn’t?). When this reporter interviewed him at his home in 2013, he kept pet miniature pigs and insisted on riding a tandem bicycle to the office — where the employee café was also stocked with healthy choices, we might add.
Comfort hotels owner Petter Stordalen with his pet pig. Now who would want to eat that?? (Photo: Billie Cohen)
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But he and his wife, Gunhild, an animal-rights activist and environmentalist, have long been advocates for sustainability. For example, their Stordalen Foundation is very involved in health and climate change issues, and years ago Stordalen chained himself to a bridge to protest a nuclear power plant.
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For now, the no-bacon plan is just in a trial period. The company will evaluate feedback and decide whether to keep it. But a local news website reported that the shift is not going so smoothly: A hotel manager of the Comfort Hotel Winn in Unea, Sweden, has said that the guests have had “mixed reactions. Some are upset, and some are understanding.” It would seem that Stordalen’s good intentions are not necessarily the way to his customers’ hearts, especially when they want to clog them up with delicious greasy breakfast meats.
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