City Harvest partners with sustainable lifestyle brand Black & Blum for Food Waste Action Week
This Food Waste Action Week, we are so excited to be partnering with sustainable lifestyle brand, Black+Blum, for the launch of its fabulous new recipe book: Let’s Do Lunch Box. Daniel Black of Black+Blum has curated a unique recipe book and dedicated team of 15 and 4 major lifestyle influencers. Black+Blum is kindly donating 5% of the proceeds of the sales to City Harvest in the name of the company’s commitment to 1% for the Planet. Black+Blum align with City Harvest’s mission to alleviate food waste in its pursuit of encouraging sustainable lunchtime solutions.
We had a chance to chat with co-founder and product designer, Dan, as he came to spend a day in City Harvest’s Acton depot in February to experience what goes on in a busy City Harvest day. This involved going out in a van on collection and delivery runs with José, one of our drivers, to sorting crates of food in the City Harvest warehouse.
A brand with creativity at its core, “everything always starts with an idea”, says Dan. Having pioneered much of the sustainable innovation imitated across some modern lifestyle brands, B+B was doing bamboo lunchbox lids almost a decade ago and has continually favoured sustainable materials which can be recycled or biodegrade. Where possible, B+B try to use non-plastic materials like bamboo, cork, glass, or stainless steel. As a company conscious about the environment and sustainability, a key question when curating the product line was: do they warrant existence? For this reason, a lot of thought and creativity is put into each product to make sure it is both artistic and functional without having detrimental environmental effects.
Product designer, Black, is passionate about the longevity of robust and multi-use materials such as vintage-looking stainless steel, reminiscent of old tin lunchboxes and tiffin tins- “we look to use materials, which have the ability to age well […] if a product can function well and age well, then it has a better chance of being cherished and looked after and this will give it a longer life which will have less impact on the environment.” The range, whilst appearing modern, uses natural and age-old ideas of storing food and drink as well as offering vessels which can even improve the quality of their contents as well as other ‘devices’ such as activated charcoal sticks- a Japanese method to filter water naturally.
Drawing from the masterful Japanese bento box and general Japanese style, B+B celebrates the lunchbox as art and through this urges their customers to celebrate what is going into the box: food. Like City Harvest, Black is passionate about rescuing food waste and explains some of the thought behind Let’s Do Lunch Box; “We wanted to create a book that would really inspire people and encourage healthy lifestyle in all areas. Drawing from Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slow, we live in a society where speed and convenience are prioritised, whereas we need to slow down and celebrate daily rituals, like lunchtime.”
Dan’s go-to product is the sandwich box, which he uses regularly.
Let’s Do Lunch Box is a collection of over 80 healthy and portable recipes curated by the B+B team and 4 international food influencers who all contributed 4 recipes to the book- they include Christine Wong of @conscious_cooking, nutritionist Ryan Carter of @livevitae, author and photographer Sara Kiyo Popowa of @shisodelicious and vegan food blogger Hanna Sunderani of @twospoons.ca. Click on the image below for your chance to WIN!
Click here to check out Let’s Do Lunch Box and more stunning products by Black+Blum.
