In a bid to remove plastic completely from Mindful Chef boxes we are looking at every individual ingredient, how it is packaged and how we might be able to improve that packaging so it is more environmentally friendly. Today we are talking about mushrooms.
Last year we delivered over 50,000 packs of mushrooms in plastic punnets (trays). Each plastic punnet weighs on average 13g which equates to a total of 650kg of plastic used on mushrooms alone. That seems like a lot even to us!
We have sourced a cardboard / paper tray (fully recyclable) which should help dramatically reduce the total amount of plastic we use to deliver our mushrooms. We will still have to use a plastic film to maintain freshness but this is something we are looking to replace with a compostable solution when it's available to the market.
Initial figures suggest we should be able to reduce our annual plastic consumption on mushrooms by over 92%
2017 - 2018
650kg of plastic used to package mushrooms
August 2018 - 2019
50kg of plastic used to package mushrooms
In a bid to completely remove plastic from the equation we are also trialling sending some varieties of mushrooms in paper bags like we did in the early days. Maintaining quality and freshness with this method has always been difficult so we are monitoring this closely to see if it's a viable solution. We are also running paper bag trials with our cherries and other ingredients like radishes.
If you want to learn more about our mission to becoming plastic-free? Check out our article about Natureflex a potential replacement for plastic.
