Food Service
5 Min Read

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.

Meghan MacConnachie
Customer Engagement Manager
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Share it!
June 14, 2024
5 Min Read

[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: 

  1. 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.
  2. 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


Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Consectetur, adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut lab. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

This is an example blog post style

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Sed vulputate odio ut enim. Volutpat sed cras ornare arcu dui. Lorem dolor sed viverra ipsum. Luctus accumsan tortor posuere ac ut consequat semper. Viverra justo nec ultrices dui sapien eget mi proin. Mollis nunc sed id semper risus in hendrerit gravida rutrum. Lacinia quis vel eros donec. Nisi vitae suscipit tellus mauris a diam. Ac orci phasellus egestas tellus rutrum tellus pellentesque eu tincidunt. Morbi quis commodo odio aenean sed adipiscing diam. Urna duis convallis convallis tellus id interdum. Tortor vitae purus faucibus ornare suspendisse sed. Vehicula ipsum a arcu cursus vitae congue. Enim sed faucibus turpis in. Orci eu lobortis elementum nibh tellus molestie nunc non blandit.

Nunc id cursus metus aliquam eleifend mi in. A erat nam at lectus urna duis convallis convallis. Tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac. Id interdum velit laoreet id donec. Egestas dui id ornare arcu odio. Gravida rutrum quisque non tellus orci ac auctor. Malesuada fames ac turpis egestas maecenas pharetra convallis. Ut diam quam nulla porttitor. Eget nunc lobortis mattis aliquam faucibus purus. Aenean sed adipiscing diam donec adipiscing tristique risus nec. Nisi est sit amet facilisis magna etiam tempor orci eu. Tortor posuere ac ut consequat.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”

<span class="blockquote-wrap">
<strong>Naomi</strong>
Head of marketing
</span>

This is an example blog post style

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Sed vulputate odio ut enim. Volutpat sed cras ornare arcu dui. Lorem dolor sed viverra ipsum. Luctus accumsan tortor posuere ac ut consequat semper. Viverra justo nec ultrices dui sapien eget mi proin. Mollis nunc sed id semper risus in hendrerit gravida rutrum. Lacinia quis vel eros donec. Nisi vitae suscipit tellus mauris a diam. Ac orci phasellus egestas tellus rutrum tellus pellentesque eu tincidunt. Morbi quis commodo odio aenean sed adipiscing diam. Urna duis convallis convallis tellus id interdum. Tortor vitae purus faucibus ornare suspendisse sed. Vehicula ipsum a arcu cursus vitae congue. Enim sed faucibus turpis in. Orci eu lobortis elementum nibh tellus molestie nunc non blandit.

<span class="rtb-protip">
<span class="rtb-protip-title"></span>
<span class="rtb-protip-body">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim.</span></span>

How to customize formatting for each rich text
  • Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod
  • Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod
  • Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod
  • Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

  1. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit sed do eiusmod
  2. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing.
  3. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing
How to customize formatting for each heading

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.