I read that Taco Bell goes through 8 billion sauce packets a year. But can’t figure out a way to make them environmentally friendly.
Is there a better way to dole out sauce?
Mexican taquerias have big communal bowls of salsa, with spoons. Too unhygienic for the US?
If you wanted to give fast food takeout customers moderate amounts of six different types of sauce, how could you do this?
I’m not sure the problem is in the sauce packets.
Stranger
I’m easily good for about 1/16 of that.
Seaweed based packages is a viable answer. Just starting up currently.
Anyway, plant based solutions are at least in the works.
I try to ask both my Deli and Chinese delivery places for no packages. The deli is good about it. The Chinese delivery places isn’t yet.
No, but part of the solution might be.
Not that I have the solution.
mmm
Wendy’s usually throws a handful in the bag, or about one sauce per about 1.7 nuggets.
The Asian place I get takeout from always asks if I want sauce. Makes sense, no? I don’t get any packets and they save money.
I feel like these places need to be trained to some degree, but I probably only order once every few weeks and so my impact is minimal.
With the Deli I know the owner by name and they know my number when I call ahead and I’m in at least weekly.
.
We’re trying to get the hang of bringing a reusable take home container with us to restaurants and I usually have a super lightweight nylon bag on me. As plastic bags are suppose to go away May 4th, it is a good habit to already have. The bag rolls up to 3.5" x 1.75" diameter. They are from Sierra Club.
When I ask for three sauce packets from Taco Bell, they give me about 15. There you go: They can reduce waste by 80% just by giving the customer the number they ask for.
Interesting. I ask for 10 and they give me 2. We need to swap Taco Bell crews.
Or find a way to average them together.
Or just stop eating at Taco Hell.
Why all the Taco Bell hate? I generally avoid fast food, but I’ll admit it’s an occasional guilty pleasure of mine.
I asked the person at the drive through (on an occasion when there was no one on the queue behind me) and she said there was no way for the order taker to specify how many packets.
No way will restaurants buy PCs (personal condiments in the biz) that only last 6 weeks. Sure, they’ll run through the ketchup packets in that time, maybe soy sauce for an Asian food, but most other condiments don’t get restocked as often. The large chains are buying these things by the truck load, it could take them 6 weeks to get distributed to the individual locations. I have most of a case full of honey PCs and I would hate ending up with a gelatinous glob of seaweed and honey in a box but at least it wouldn’t be leaking liquid like with soy sauce and other packets.
My answer was admittedly flip and a bit cryptic but the essential problem is real: “fast food” is as about as environmentally unfriendly as it could possibly be and attacking the packaging of a single item is like reducing carbon emissions by telling people to breathe less hard. Sauce packets are certainly an offense to nature, and being made of polyethylene terephthalate, aluminum foil, and impermeable pigments means that they’ll be around as crumpled nasty balls of waste for tens of thousands of years but addressing that problem is like banning drinking straws; it makes an effective advertising campaign for companies to show how they are “good corporate citizens”, inconveniences consumers who rail against it and find or demand alternatives that largely negate any benefit, and effectively does fuck all about the general problem of waste and environmental contamination. Just about every aspect of fast food from the global distribution chains and food waste to inefficient use of power and car-centric nature of the business is basically one big uppercut to environmentalism.
The notion of “big communal bowls” of sauces is unpalatable (pun intended) for fast food corporations given the potential liability for contamination and contagion, the cost of having to refill and clean them, and the fact that unlike fresh salsa made daily by taquerias preserved condiments need to be stored in containers with little or no surface area exposed to the air lest they desiccate and form a disgusting crust. Of course, you could not store mayonnaise or other perishable condiments in the open regardless. Younger posters probably don’t recall but fast food places used to have bottles on the tables (messy, gross, required labor to clean and refill), went to pumps near the cashier (even more messy and unsanitary, less individual effort but produced waste in the form of paper cups which were often spilled or thrown by unruly children and obnoxious teenagers), and most have since gone just to packaged condiments that are hygienic, take little effort to stock and distribute, and push all the problems of waste and cleaning up on the consumer.
Stranger
Many fast food places have dispensers for ketchup, mustard and the like. Consumers press down on the knob on top and fill a little paper cup with the sauce.
Costco foregoes the paper cup and customers put the condiments directly on their $1.50 hotdog. They have regular mustard, deli mustard, ketchup and pickle relish in the dispensers, plus a drumlike kind of thing which dispenses chopped onion.
I haven’t been there since the pandemic but pre-COVID, Nando’s just had bottles of their sauces with pour spouts at a “sauce station.” You get some there, or dine-in you can take a whole bottle to your table to use. I don’t know what their current system is, or if it’s even different.
To-go, you buy an unopened 8 oz bottle (or larger). I always did because their sauce is awesome. Now I just get the sauce from amazon and make my own chicken.
That won’t work for drive-thru customers (and neither will those large pump dispensers for ketchup and other condiments). And drive-thru is a huge part of the business for these restaurants.
I think you’re misinterpreting the article. They mean it will biodegrade in 4-6 weeks once in the dump. While stored properly it should hold up without issue.
They can be disposed of (like fruit peel) in a kitchen food waste bin or home-compost after use and will disappear in as little as four to six weeks.
But this is just one company as an example. There are other alternatives being tried besides the current plastics.
Heinz who is one of the largest players in this market is aggressively pursuing alternatives.
We’ll see what happens.