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New restaurant rules in Palo Alto soon will mean big changes for the city’s eateries and eventually could mean adjustments for the restaurant industry elsewhere in the Bay Area. Beginning in 2020, Palo Alto restaurants will have to replace all plastic items such as straws, utensils, cups and lids.
The Palo Alto City Council recently approved a disposable foodware ordinance, one of 48 initiatives in the city’s Zero Waste Plan, that targets straws and other plastic foodware.
This follows AB 1884, a bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2018 that requires full-service restaurants – but not fast-food or quick-service eateries – to provide plastic straws only upon customer request. Individual cities, however, can implement their own more restrictive policies, as Palo Alto has done. Buying compostable or reusable alternatives to disposable foodware can raise costs for businesses.
“I used to buy a package of straws for $58. Now the case is $89,” said Paul Ames, executive chef at Tender Greens, a restaurant at the Stanford Shopping Center that serves chef-driven, locally sourced dishes. “But it’s just a drop in the bucket.”
According to research by the city of Palo Alto, the average cost of each foodware item would increase between 1 cent and 2 cents, numbers that seem low but add up when restaurants are serving restless lines of hungry diners during rush hours. The impact of higher costs can vary from small businesses to large-scale businesses, but it is a factor restaurants need to consider.
Not only are alternatives to plastic disposable items more expensive, restaurants can also encounter difficulties in finding actual alternatives to use among the options on the market and provided by restaurant suppliers.
“We try to be as environmentally friendly as possible,” said J.P. Coupal, manager of Coupa Cafe, which has several locations in Palo Alto. “But a lot is trial and error.”
Coupa Cafe has been making sustainable changes since 2013, well before restrictions on straws and plastic foodware began. Coupal said the process to convert to more sustainable foodware is long and involves purchasing different products and trying them in the restaurants. He said management evaluates feedback and discusses which products are best to use, balancing cost and quality.
As with any changes, restaurant customers also need time to adjust.
“We’re always having that conversation with customers,” said Ames, the chef at Tender Greens. “It’s a large part of our business model having discussions about the product and impact.”
Even without a single, streamlined policy regarding restrictions on disposable food ware, restaurants with multiple locations in different cities likely will make the changes for all of them.
“When it comes to running larger businesses, you want a supply chain that is uniform,” Ames said. “It makes it more difficult to have one area doing one thing, and one area doing another. Talking to suppliers, we would be making changes for the entirety of our restaurant.”
Generally, quick-service restaurants will have to make greater adjustments because dine-in restaurants use fewer disposables than take-out restaurants. In a survey of food-service establishments by the city of Palo Alto, 52% said converting to compostable foodware would be easy. Even so, the adjustment can still be difficult for many.
“We’re changing little by little,” said Malek Kaci, co-owner of La Boheme, a French restaurant on California Avenue in Palo Alto. “It costs money, especially for small businesses. They order their straws, but they don’t want to spend extra money for any alternatives for now.”
In these past months, Kaci said customers have been more conscious about using straws and reducing waste in general. The restaurant still uses plastic straws but plans to switch to biodegradable straws soon.
Palo Alto is relatively ahead in terms of sustainability. Since 2007, the city has made efforts with initiatives such as the Climate Protection Plan and the Sustainability and Climate Action Plan Framework.
“It’s great now everybody is talking about climate change,” Kaci said. “If we don’t do it now, I don’t know when we’re going to start. I think we’re getting there but we’re a little late. We set the example for other cities.”
