If you’re a weekly meal box subscriber, you may have noticed way fewer plastic containers in your deliveries recently.

When we started the program, we were in the pandemic, new to this whole home delivery thing, and a big concern was making sure that nothing spilled inside the boxes. So we relied on post-consumer recycled containers (aka plastic deli containers) for a lot of the items.

And it’s a weird thing — despite the fact that the food is doing great stuff for the planet — it’s hard to shake the viscerally bad feeling of a column of plastic piling up in your sink or recycling bin.

So we’ve been transitioning a few items away from plastic:

• Salad and leafy things get packed in Kraft paper cartons
• Herbs get packed in wax paper envelopes
• Butter (and buttery things) get wrapped in wax paper
• Oven-to-table items come in the foil that you’ll bake them in
• Any raw/whole ingredients (e.g. carrots, radishes, will just come as-is)
• Soon: soups will be packed in glass jars

We’ve also shrunk down the size of our stickers, and moved away from colored ink.

Let us know if you have feedback on these changes. Of course this is just a precursor to our big goal of an entirely zero waste operation. For real. We’d be picking up containers from your house, washing them, and sending clean ones out packed with food. We have 100 people who have signed up to beta-test this wild idea. Send us an email at info@cloverfoodlab.com if you want to be on that list.