Just Salad’s War On Plastic Continues With A New Paper Bowl

Just Salad – which now has locations in multiple states (and Dubai), and, despite its name, also sells wraps, grain bowls and soups – prioritized recycling from the get-go. When first starting out, Kenner and his partner Rob Crespi spent a lot of time designing the precise style of the bowls in which their new restaurant would serve their salads. Then they scrapped the whole thing: “We felt bad having them go in the garbage and waste a tremendous amount of plastic,” says Kenner. So they went back to the drawing board and came up with a weirdly attractive, UFO-looking reusable plastic bowl – and a plan to convince customers to use them.

The bowls are offered at checkout for $1 a piece. But if you bring the bowl back at a later visit? You’ll score some free toppings, which Kenner says come in around $1.00 to $1.50 each visit. The bowls have proved to be a success: they’ve sold more than 133,000 since 2006. In New York City alone, Kenner says that amounts to about 75,000 pounds of plastic saved each year from the city’s landfills.

“Some people did it because they cared about the environment and wanted to reduce their consumption of plastic, and other people didn’t care about plastic and just wanted free food,” says Kenner. “From our perspective that didn’t really matter.”

Just Salad’s signature reusable plastic bowls.

They’re also great branding – these distinctively shaped bowls, which are neon green, orange and white, have become synonymous with Just Salad. They’ve even built-up a cult following of sorts in some cycles, and they company issues special-edition, VIP bowls – which let you skip the line and give you even more free toppings – to contest winners or auctions them off for charity every once in awhile.

All this success aside, it’s roughly just 20 to 25 percent of customers who opt into the reusable bowl program, and that’s not enough for Kenner; that’s still an awful lot of plastic going to the landfill after a single use.

“We have disposable plastic bowls for the customers who don’t want the reusable bowls,” says Kenner. “They’re made of 100% recycled plastic, which is better than virgin plastic, but it’s still plastic.” Hoping to get away from the petrochemical game altogether, Just Salad will be launching new single-use bowls made of something a little more Earth-friendly: paper.

These bowls, made of a paper fiber, will arrive at 25 percent of the New York City locations “in about a month,” says Kenner. Made of a paper-like wood fiber, these bowls decompose quickly and easily, unlike the plastic bowls, which could take hundreds of years.