As more businesses strive to increase their sustainability practices, many are turning to commercial composting services as a solution. Such is the case for Mood Food, a bustling, health-oriented eatery in Fort Lee committed to sustainability. Here’s a closer look at our commercial composting services and how we’ve partnered with Mood Food to help them achieve their sustainability goals.
What Commercial Composting Services Do We Offer?
In addition to servicing individuals with residential compost pickup, we also do the same for businesses. Currently, we serve the following types of businesses:
Large-scale commercial kitchens / Eateries
Municipalities
Office spaces
Restaurants
Event venues
Property management
We help businesses like these to support local agriculture by transforming their food waste into nutrient-dense compost that is used locally. We aid businesses’ efforts in responsible waste management by keeping their waste out of landfills, which can produce harmful methane gases. When you partner with us, we’ll provide sustainability reports and diversion metrics so you know how much of a difference your commercial composting makes in your community. We also offer education to our partners’ employees so they know how they can make a difference when it comes to sustainability.
Mood Food: Commercial Kitchen Sustainability in Action
As the owner of Mood Food, Yong Shin understands how important it is to keep restaurant practices sustainable. Partnering with Neighborhood Compost has enabled Shin to ensure the business has a good impact on the community and environment.
By sourcing local, high-quality ingredients and composting scraps, Mood Food has diverted
18,000 pounds (or 9 tons) of waste from landfills since 2020. That equates to about 18,000 miles driven and 800 gallons of gas offset by employees’ efforts. Most of Mood Food’s composting scraps come from its juice bar, including lemon peels, fruit and vegetable pulp and ginger root skins. Other scraps come from the eggshells leftover from the baked goods made in-house, which are a great source of calcium, and nitrogen-rich coffee grounds.
“Finding Neighborhood Compost has been a tremendous help to continue our strive to make a positive impact on our planet,” Shin said. “If we could as a society just agree to compost all of our food and paper waste and use the compost back into our farms, we could easily make a huge impact to healing our planet."
How Our Compost Pickup Service Works in a Busy Commercial Kitchen
Mood Food, as an eatery that feeds the community, generates a lot of compostable food waste every week. Our composting process helps them to put this waste to good use. We provide Mood Food's team with smaller containers for internal use and a large tote for external dumping of the smaller containers. Each week, we swap out their large outdoor tote behind their building with a new one. No matter the weather, having this tote outside has not been a problem for pests — even during the hot summer months. Upon pickup, we weigh the food scraps to provide Mood Food's community with that valuable sustainability reporting. We then take it to our New Jersey family farm for our animals to eat. Then, we take the animals’ manure and any residual food scraps to be composted so it’s ready to be returned to the Garden State’s soil and used to grow food organically.
Our Northern New Jersey Commercial Composting Services
Like Mood Food does, you can use commercial composting services to help make a difference in your community. Partnering with us is an easy way for your business to reduce its carbon footprint and support the local environment. Learn more about our commercial plans and sign up to get started by visiting our commercial plans page.