Kitchen News

with Dan Hurlbut, Food Service Department Manager •The salad bar is reopening; soup’s back on the menu. How does the availability comply with state law? State law at this point is back to normal— and has been since about the beginning of the year. We have and are taking extra precautions to keep our team and guests safe.

•When did soup come back? Soup opened in the middle of February with quite a different process to ensure the health and safety of all. We offer gloves and sanitizer at the station, with signage stating that masks must remain on at all times and no sampling is allowed.

Single-use ladles. We purchased 75 ladles so that we could offer a clean one to everyone buying soup; we have a “clean pot” and a “dirty pot” for ladle storage at the soup station. Our team would bring in the dirty pot to wash and sanitize before returning to service. Salad bar opened with very minimal offerings at the beginning of April and we just expanded it [in late April]. Here it is not feasible to offer a single-use tong for everyone due to cross-contamination of the toppings, so we offer sanitizer and gloves for this self-serve station. The station has been working well so far with happy customers.

•What about other offerings? Plans are in the works for the hot bar to return. There is no set date as of yet, but we will be looking to have some sort of offer available by the end of May. Safety precautions will be similar to that of the salad bar. But before the rollout of the hot bar, a brand-new...

...burger bar will debut! We have a new program that will be moving forward—a burger bar! Create your own burgers. This will include beef, marinated mushroom patties, and Beyond Meat patties to choose from, along with many toppings. In addition, we will be offering sides of crispy potato wedges or Cajun charred green beans; the team recently met with local chef Ric Orlando and will be using his Cajun seasoning for the beans. Loaded potato wedges will also be an option. Guests can choose sauces and toppings to load up their basket!

Now Collecting Glass Yogurt Jars from Berle Farm

Cow-friendly Berle Farm of Hoosick Falls is committed to sustainability “from the ground up.”

Because sustainability is a community

effort, HWFC will now be collecting glass jars from Berle Farm’s cow milk yogurt. Jars simply need to be rinsed and dried, then returned to the Service Desk at the Co-op. Thanks to HWFC dairy buyer Laura Angell for setting this up, and thanks to all for spreading the word to shoppers who will make the extra effort to get the beautiful jars back to these dynamic farmers whose commitment is fundamental.

“Jars...can be hand washed,” added Laura. “We only carry one plain yogurt product from Berle, but it is [sold] off the shelves regularly and is a staple in Dairy. The jars have a printed logo so no labels need to be removed...this [may] be a first time for collection at Honest Weight.

“It is super that we can initiate a system to get these beautiful jars back to her for reuse to reduce waste. It is a community effort!” —Morgaen Hansen

We’ll send them back to Berle Farm

biweekly for reuse as part of a continued effort to cut down on packaging and waste in our local food chain. •We placed 1st in the Times Union’s “Best Of” for vegetarian restaurant. That’s HUGE. Hearing the news that the Kitchen at Honest Weight won best vegetarian “restaurant” was such an honor! Being looped into the wonderful restaurants in the area really made the team and myself proud.

Owners, shoppers, and staff have all been thrilled to see soup and salad back in action. Everyone seems to be very satisfied with our current safety precautions, so we’re starting to feel much more confident in bringing back offerings like the hot bar. The team is doing an incredible job keeping up with the additional work of keeping everything clean and presentable, in addition to the regular work of keeping everything fresh and delicious!

We are back to selling $1,050 in soup each week, and $270 from the salad bar (though we just fully launched the salad bar with all of its options this week, so that will continue to grow quite a bit). Our overall Food Service Department sales are back to $52,000–$54,000/week these past few weeks, which is about 24% below where we were pre-COVID.

Café! Olé! Some more exciting news: we are tentatively planning to reopen the indoor café seating area in June. The café seating area is really the heart of the Co-op in so many ways—people love to have a place to sit, chat, have a meeting, enjoy a coffee, breakfast, lunch, or dinner. This is an essential piece of bringing our Food Service Department, and the Co-op as a whole, back to normal, and we can’t wait. We should have an official reopening date to share with you soon.