Should we start with a joke?
Something about how our company deeply values transparency, but you’ll just have to take our word for it since all of our packaging is opaque?
No good? Ok, fine. Then let’s just keep it simple:
We care about the environment. We want to leave it a better place than we found it.
We know there’s a lot more work to do, but here’s a look at where we’re at today.
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We support sustainable agriculture and the farmers that practice it. This is why 100% of our products are made with 100% organic ingredients.
We spend a lot of time thinking about packaging. Nothing makes us happier than finding that beautiful intersection of functionality & sustainability – where user-friendly meets eco-friendly.
Our packaging has a relatively small carbon footprint. We’ve chosen packaging formats made of lightweight materials that require less energy to manufacture & transport. That means fewer Greenhouse Gas emissions throughout the supply chain (compared to other common packaging types like plastic, glass, or aluminum).
And we prioritize using materials that come from renewable resources rather than fossil-fuel based resources. That’s partly why we love kraft paper so much. And it’s why we recently replaced the plastic caps on our cartons with sugar-cane caps.
TL, DR; recycle our products! You can, you should! Here’s the slightly-more-complicated breakdown for each product:
- Shipping boxes – nothing special, recycle with paper/cardboard
- Cold Brew Boxes – be sure to separate the bag & the box; the bag gets recycled with mixed plastic, the box gets recycled with paper/cardboard
- Coffee Pods – separate the foil from the pod, remove the filter & coffee grounds (compost or discard these). Recycle foil lid and plastic capsule.
- Coffee Grounds – recycle or compost the grounds; to recycle the bag, you must remove the one-way plastic valve (we’re sorry about this, it’s the one price we chose to pay for the freshness of your coffee)
- Cartons – ok, this one is a bit more nuanced. There’s a lot to love about our Tetrapak packaging, but unfortunately not every community is capable of recycling these cartons. To find out if Tetrapak is recyclable in your area, visit https://www.recyclecartons.com/ (where you can also find additional resources on how to recycle or properly dispose of these cartons).
In the early days of Wandering Bear, all of our products required refrigeration at all times. Over time, we started producing and packaging our products in more sophisticated ways, and we developed the capability to make our products shelf-stable, which we officially did in early 2019.
That means we’re able to store and ship our products at ambient temperatures without compromising on taste, freshness, or product safety.
It also means we’re able to move our products through their lifecycle -- from our production plant to your doorstep -- with far less energy consumption at each step; it is estimated that an ambient supply chain consumes as much as 70% less energy than a refrigerated or “cold chain” supply chain.
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So that’s where we’re at. And this is just the start.
Have questions that we didn’t address? Have ideas for ways to improve our sustainability efforts? Want to brag about your composting? We’d love to hear from you! Contact us here.