New JAM Initiative Reduces Single-Use Plastic Waste!
As a busy catering company, JAM prepares thousands of meals each month. We make it all as individual components, which get packed, loaded onto trucks, transported, unpacked, assembled, and finished just before service. Many of these items make the journey in plastic “deli” containers of various sizes, similar to what you might buy, say, a pint of sour cream in, or a quart of potato salad.
Catering trucks can be bouncy, so we typically swath each container in several layers plastic wrap, just in case the lid decides to come loose or crack or leak for some other reason. In the catering biz this is called “cater wrapping” and it’s something almost every caterer working with freshly prepared food does to protect food in transit.
In 2023, we purchased 171 boxes of 18-inch plastic wrap to support our catering wrapping ‘habit.’ At 1,000 yards per box, that’s over 97 miles of plastic wrap—just a little shy of the distance between our venues, The Duke Sculpture Garden and Waterloo Village.
Regrettably, our own reliance on plastic wrap has for years been adding to the problem, so it’s pretty clear we’d all benefit from using it a little more judiciously. It’s worth noting, of course, that the real work of reducing single-use plastics needs to be done by the industries that create them in the first place—by providing more durable, more reusable alternatives—but until that happens it’s worth doing what we can on the consumer level.
So, in the spirit of “do what you can, with what you have, where you are right now,” last year JAM started looking around for new food packing solutions that would make wasteful cater wrapping unnecessary.
We soon discovered a new line of “CamSquares FreshPro” containers made by Cambro, well known as a manufacturer of sturdy food storage solutions for the food and beverage industry. These square containers have lids that fit very snugly inside the rims, creating a slight vacuum effect that keeps the lid on nice and tight. Their rigid-but-flexible polyethylene walls make them very durable. Their square shapes stack snugly inside travel bins and can be doubly secured if necessary with thick reusable rubber bands. They come in various convenient sizes from one pint up to five gallons. And, after testing them in the field for a few weeks, we decided it really is true that they don’t need cater wrapping.
The FreshPro line is definitely much more expensive than the usual semi-disposable “deli style” containers we’ve used for so many years, but we decided their long-term reusability, durable construction, and spill-proof design might make them worth the investment as a way to reduce out plastic wrap usage. So invest we did—to the tune of nearly $70,000! A few weeks later, a giant truck rolled up and unloaded 14,268 new FreshPro containers, all now stacked neatly along an entire wall in the JAM kitchen.
So far the new containers are working very well, keeping our food safe and secure during transport and returning to perfect condition after each wash. We estimate that by the end of 2024 this investment may have reduced our plastic wrap usage by at least 50% and probably more!
Now, $70K is a lot of money…. Is it worth it? Financially, probably not: Plastic wrap and deli containers would still be a lot cheaper. But in terms of doing the right thing, and in terms of sending a message about where we stand on the issue of plastic waste, the answer is a resounding YES!