By Ginger Graham and Miranda Guettlein
We have begun a grand adventure!
In 2024, we had over 250,000 guests at Ginger and Baker – that’s a lot of plates, forks, pie slices, carrots and radishes, linens, scuff marks… basically a lot of everything.
One of the many things we try to manage is how much trash we create and boy, is that challenging!
A key part of our trash is food related. All the coffee grounds, potato peels (heavens, we peel a lot of potatoes!), fish skins, lemon wedges and veggie tops. And then there is all the food that our guests don’t eat: steak bones, one bite too much of mashed potatoes, butter leftover from the biscuits (as if). It just ends up being a lot of food waste!
We have long been taking all the veggie, fruit, coffee and prep waste to our farm and composting it there. But as the business grows — and our food waste continues to grow with items we can’t compost on the farm — we turned to Compost Queen for help.
Here’s more on that partnership from Miranda, our talented Teaching Kitchen Coordinator and a passionate gardener and novice composter:
Meet the Compost Queen!
When Ginger and Baker decided to partner with Compost Queen, we got to tour their facility and learn all about their story, processes, and mission. Jamie Blanchard-Poling (the Queen herself) started her composting journey back in 2018, when she discovered a complete lack of food scrap composters in Northern Colorado, so she and her husband, Max, founded Compost Queen.
Composting is always sustainable and regenerative, but they take it even further by donating some of the food that is grown through regenerative farming at their facility to local charities and returning a share of the compost created to their clients.
Expanding Our Compost Program
Here at G&B, where so much of our produce is grown at Jack and Ginger’s farm up the road, this is the perfect arrangement. We’ve always composted food waste to the farm, but with the technology they have at Compost Queen, we’re now able to compost not just produce scraps, eggshells and coffee grounds, but dairy, cooked meat/bones, bread and some paper products. Anything left on guests’ plates can be scraped into the compost bin rather than the garbage, and a portion of the compost created from our food waste goes right back into the next growing season at the farm.
At pickup, they weigh and track how much you compost and the positive environmental effects, which is updated monthly for you to see on the client portal on their website. In the first few months we’ve partnered with them, G&B has diverted over 15,000 pounds of food waste from the landfill and saved nearly 10,000 pounds each of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from being produced.
Compost Queen is also committed to education—all our managers and employees received extensive training and if Compost Queen finds any contaminants, they send a photo back to us to ensure that we all know what can and cannot be composted. Their team is small, so all bins are hand-sorted to ensure that nothing foreign ends up in the compost piles, and they continue to test various paper products and “compostable” packaging to ensure that everything that goes into their final product will be beneficial to the soil.
Residential Partnerships
In addition to partnering with several local businesses, Compost Queen offers residential service, so you can collect your own food waste, have it picked up bi-weekly from your home, and twice a year, can collect your share of finished compost for your garden.
You can also find them at the Larimer’s County Farmer’s Market on Saturdays throughout the summer, and they’re always happy to share compost/gardening tips and have some of their finished compost for sale, in case you happen to pick up a little plant while you’re there as well.
We’re so proud to add Compost Queen to our list of community partners, they’re a perfect fit for our commitment to sustainability, local agriculture, and supporting small businesses in our community.
Learn more about Compost Queen here.
