Just Salad, whose reusable bowl program helps save more than 75,000 pounds of plastic every year, is likewise saving money while diverting food and packaging waste from landfills, according to Sandra Noonan, chief sustainability officer at the New York-based fast casual chain.
“When I can show my chief operating officer that reusable [packaging] actually saves us money or a food waste reduction program helps his P&L, which it does, that’s icing on the cake," she said during the 2021 NYC Food Waste Fair session “Beyond Scraps: Strategies for Reducing Food-Related Plastics & Packaging,” Friday.
Just Salad is home to the world’s largest restaurant reusable bowl program which began when it launched operations 15 years ago. Patrons can purchase a reusable blue bowl for $1 and every time they bring it back to the store, can receive a free salad topping.
“Since our founding in 2006, we’ve had the blue bowl program,” she said. “We tried exclusively offering reusable bowls, but people threw them in the trash, so we had to offer both reusable and disposable bowls. The program incentivizes them to ditch the single use bowl."
Earlier this year, the chain debuted its BringBack Bowl program that involves a green reusable bowl that can be used to package online deliveries. “If you order online and select the BringBack option, you’ll get your order in the green bowl which you can then bring back to Just Salad and we’ll wash and sanitize it,” Noonan explained.
Whereas the blue bowl program involves buying a bowl, the BringBack program, currently available in two NYC locations, is more like renting a bowl. After it’s cleaned and sanitized, it’s put back into circulation for other take-out orders.
“We think a cocktail of solutions is necessary so we’re offering different programs and collecting data to see what’s working and how to optimize it,” Noonan said.
DeliverZero facilitates a reusable packaging system for takeout, but instead of involving a single chain, it involves a network of restaurants, said founder and CEO Adam Farbiarz.
“Customers can go to DeliverZero’s website, order food, and it shows up in reusable packaging,” he explained. The customer then has six weeks to return the container to either the same restaurant, another restaurant in the network, or, if they order again, they can give the containers back to the delivery person. "The carrier then returns them to the restaurant where they are washed.”
Making the program easy for customers is essential to its success, Farbiarz said. He noted that there are no upfront costs for the consumer, they have a long window of time to return the containers, and there are lots of ways to return them. “We have to make this easy to get to the next step,” he said.
Reducing Food Waste
Food waste is top of mind at Just Salad. “We try to be disciplined about how much food we cook, but it’s impossible to predict demand perfectly day-to-day,” said Noonan. “We try to sell it at a discount or donate it to charity.”
To help sell excess food at a reduced rate, the chain partners with the Too Good to Go app.
“At the end of the night, there wasn’t a way to scale with efficiency to put that food to work. Today that’s no longer a problem so we sell surplus food on the app and it’s helped us to prevent it from going to compost or the landfill bin,” she said.
Related: Food Suppliers Commit to Reducing Food Waste; Consortium Seeks to Rethink Single-Use Plastic Bags.
Image: Just Salad