Cafe Rica

Hey everybody how's it going this is Jackson Cafe Rica and here today to talk about sustainability and what we're doing in the month of April. The mission that Cafe Rica has in it being with sustainability is that we really want to bring the highest quality of product that we can and we want to give you the highest quality experience when you come to our shop or if you shop online. We want to bring that but we also want to be very sustainable and be green. We don't want to create a bunch of waste. We just want to One of the reasons that me interested decided to focus on sustainability when we started Cafe Rica was because Cafe Naranjo stresses sustainability a lot and that is who we get most of our coffee from. So we wanted to align our values with them to make sure that were kind of not necessarily abiding but lined up specifically with how they like to operate and they're a co-op of The steps that we take to become more sustainable and kind of lower our carbon footprint is you know we have packaging that we have sourced that is post-cons So we use greenware for our plastic cups and fully compostable paper cups. These are made with plant-based plastics instead of petrole We also like to use We don't use plastic straws. We use paper straws that's one of the major things that have come up recently as Our K-Cups that we use is a hundred percent compostable as well. Another thing in the cafe that we use is our wood spoons, our paper straws. Our mug club is a 20 ounce refillable mug. It's very similar. Lines are really similar to a lot of breweries. They have a mug club. You pay for the mug up front and when you bring it in you get a few perks and with us you get a little bit more coffee. Another reason why we did the mug club was to be sustainable. It encourages people to bring in either their cup from home, a random cup from home, or the one that we sell that says mug club that gets the perks that helps use renewable sources or resources instead of using a one-time thing over and over again over time that can add up. We don't want to just fill our drinks in our products with just things that are bad for you. They kind of pertain to us being sustainable. We use from blue cat our syrups are just three ingredients, water, pure sugar cane, and natural flavoring. That really is a little bit better for you than using syrups that have corn syrup in it. We also try to use as fresh as ingredients as we possibly can. For the same reason, we just don't want to add a bunch of bad things into your body just We maintain high quality in our products because we go with sources and vendors that make sure they have high quality sustainable products. We might have to spend a little bit more, but we look for those higher quality products The reason we are kind of celebrating the month of April is because Earth Day is on April 22nd and it's really the start of spring. We just wanted to make sure that we could share our ecological values with everybody else and try to get everybody to get on board with trying to make this planet a better place to live. If we don'take care of it now, it's going to be that much harder to take care of it or rejuvenate it later. We just want to celebrate the fact that more and more people are trying to do what's right for the planet instead of just doing what's right for them.