Bringing Carbon Consciousness to the Masses
How Just Salad is digging into their carbon footprint, ingredient-by-ingredient to make their Climatarian menu a staple & inspiration to consumers while increasing sales and reducing their emissions.
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October 4, 2023
[fs-toc-h2]About Just Salad
“Eat with Purpose” describes Just Salad in a nutshell. Originally founded in 2006, Just Salad has been a leading innovator in the fast-casual restaurant space, spearheading sustainability and bringing it to the masses. Raising awareness within consumers’ everyday choices that our food selections have a direct impact on the health of ourselves as well as the earth, Just Salad has empowered consumers to take action in their everyday lives.
[fs-toc-h2]The Challenge
Just Salad is known for their healthy, convenient and delicious meal options, which are also customizable. Enabling consumers to realize how easy and accessible climate-conscious choices are, Just Salad wanted to dig deep on tools they can provide consumers to make a bigger change in the world. In deciding to launch a Climaritarian Menu, Just Salad realized they needed a partner that could provide the in-depth detail needed across ingredients to not only educate their chefs in crafting the menu, but also make it digestible and enticing for consumers. Enter Planet FWD, who has amassed the farm-level database of ingredients to sift through thousands of options as well as provide critical data points on why an ingredient is a better choice for the planet.
[fs-toc-h2]The Solution
Planet FWD supports Just Salad on calculating the carbon footprint of all their ingredients and menu items. Just Salad uses this data to carbon label their menus in all store locations and their online ordering platform. Since launching their Climatarian menu in 2020, Just Salad has seen a 10% increase in sales week-over-week in their Climatarian menu orders. With the enormous response to their climate focus and the excitement consumers have for understanding carbon emissions, Just Salad has continued to up-level their climate game both from a sourcing perspective and with consumers.
[fs-toc-h2]Outcomes
Two major actions that have come out of their work with Planet FWD are:
- When using the Just Salad app to order, consumers can purchase offsets in the equivalent amount of their meal footprint, empowering consumers again to see how easy making a difference in climate can be.
- For supplier selection and recipe development, thanks to Planet FWD’s hotspot analysis, Just Salad was able to investigate their high emissions items and look for alternatives. First with regenerative growers, as well as vegan alternatives, and ultimately switched to several of these. Some notable examples of ingredient choices are their Regenerative Organic Certified Quinoa supplied by SIMPLi, which saw a 200% reduction compared to conventional quinoa, and their Vegan Feta, which had an 82% lower carbon footprint than dairy feta per kg. This resulted in the footprints of various meals to drop by 4% to 20%, depending on the ingredients and as much as 82% to 200% on a per ingredient basis.
Alex Harden, Supply Chain and Sustainability Manager at Just Salad, summarized why working with Planet FWD was critical to success:
<span class="small-blockquote">“When we became the first US restaurant chain to carbon label its menu in 2020, we were running our calculations in-house. It’s a data-intensive process, which can be a barrier for many teams. Teaming up with Planet FWD to provide third-party verified cradle-to-grave carbon labels has helped us streamline the measurement of these footprints so we can spend more time managing them. Planet FWD helps us share the clear, quantifiable impact of switching to lower footprint ingredients.”</span>
Just Salad is a lead example of how an organization can impact not only consumers, but their internal team members and sourcing partners to bring climate awareness to the forefront, so everyone can help make progress in climate change and understand that the small moves of daily habits, add up to the big moves in moving the needle on climate change.
Naomi
Head of marketing
Head of marketing
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<strong>Naomi</strong>
Head of marketing
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