Sunbasket is Driving Food Sustainability within the FoodIndustry

Mike Wargocki, Senior Vice President Operations, Sunbasket

The Food industry has an interesting challenge in front of it today.  Inflation and supply chain interruptions are driving prices up while consumers are looking for a more sustainable, healthy, and environmentally friendly food experience.Of course,all those virtues are balanced by expectations for cost effect, convenient and easy customer experiences.  At Sunbasket, I’m proud to be part of a company that acknowledges these challenges and has set food sustainability as one of our brand pillars. 

Let’s start at the beginning of the process,with our suppliers and the types of products we use in our meals.  Sunbasket is a certified organic handler and committed to providing organic produce and foods to our patrons whenever possible.  

By bringing the larger scale demand that a national food delivery platform like Sunbasket has, we are able to help promote and increase the amount of acreage being dedicated to these more sustainable farming practices.  As with any process the more cycles people get to refine how it works, the better they get at performing that process.  We hope to see other farmers and food manufacturers acknowledge the quality and good yields from these improved organic farming practices and have this influence the greater produce market. 

As with any process the more cycles people get to refine how it works, the better they get at performing that process

In addition to organic produce, our meats are all sustainably raised and antibiotic free.  We also have organic options available for almost every type of protein and are expanding our plant-based meat alternative selections weekly.  Our chefs and procurement teams work with local vendors to carefully select those suppliers who are committed to sustainable production practices and in many cases give these small producers a way to expose their products to a much wider audience than they could manage through their traditional distribution channels. 

Now the final piece in this sustainability puzzle is the inbound and outbound logistics. You need to be able to minimize the impact of those processes to ensure that the gains we are promoting on food ingredients are realized.  To do this we work with local farmers and suppliers as much as possible and when we need to send products across the country, our team looks to maximize the truck load quantities and minimize the pickups to ensure we send the fewest trucks possible on those long runs.  On the outbound side we carefully watch the weather in every zipcode that we ship to across the USA on a weekly basis and have developed algorithms to minimize the packaging materials needed while ensuring that all the food safety targets are met for each customer’s box. 

It's great to be a part of a company that acknowledges our challenges in this arena and is putting forward its best effort to maximize the food supply chain’s sustainability.  For more information on Sunbasket and or sustainability efforts, please visit our webpage: https://www.Sunbasket.com;  https://www.Sunbasket.com/organic; https://www.Sunbasket.com/recycle