Sustainability is a major 🔑. It’s “the ability to continue a behavior or practice indefinitely,” but where do delicious plant-based burgers and fries fit in? For HipCityVeg, sustainability is centered around three factors – our people, our planet, and our purpose. Everything, from locally-sourced ingredients to compostable packaging and recycling, from our in-store spaces to our policies, has gotta be sustainable. It’s our motto for everything we do, and it starts with the resources we bring into the store. We think Mother Nature is pretty rad, so we want to do our best to look out for her.
So what does “compostable” mean exactly? You hear it really often as a marketing term, but what it literally means is that something will break down completely in the soil – leaving no toxic residue or waste and even providing nutrients to the ground. “Black gold,” as it’s called by many gardeners, returns much needed carbon and nitrogen to the soil, helping your garden flourish. We take all of our food scraps and compost them, in hopes of bettering the soil that gave us all our delicious veggies we cook with.
All of our packaging – from knives, forks, and napkins to plates, cups, and take-out containers – are made from corn and sugar by-products, no petroleum. We even got a cosign from the BPI (Biodegradable Products Institute) who placed their stamp of approval on everything we use.
Compostable packaging made from renewable resources actually uses less energy and produces two-thirds less greenhouse gases than conventional plastic production, and that’s what it’s all about – finding a long-term, environmentally beneficial production method. Whatever we can’t compost, we do our very best to recycle and reuse. That means almost everything in our stores started from the bottom as something else, and will live another life later on.
Compostable packaging is just one piece of the sustainability puzzle. We’re proud to play our part with simple, environmentally-friendly practices – leaving a posi impact and helping out our planet instead or hurting it. That’s just one way we’re showing the world our #BestSelf.