Local Is Better - for our community and our planet!

October 16, 2021 3 min read

Local Is Better - for our community and our planet!
As we approach our tenth anniversary, it's interesting to take a peek and see how the world has changed since we opened our doors back in 2012.

There are so many new ways to get food on your table - including national companies freezing and shipping meals directly to customers far away from where that food was sourced.

This week, we're taking a peek at some of the things that differentiate us from those larger companies - it was a fun reflection, so we hope you enjoy!

We know our farmers 

It's true! We've met them and visited many of the farms we source veggies from. Had conversations with growers around the techniques used to create gorgeous vegetables. Know who's using organic technique and who is not. We also have direct lines of communication back to many of our sources, to share feedback on what works and what doesn't, to help them improve their processes, making locally sourced produce more accessible to other food based businesses. It's a nice little communication loop, reinforced heartily by our friends at Freshlist, who provide most of the transportation between our fav local farms and our kitchen.

We are environmentally responsible

Y'all already know that we're serious about reusing and rehoming the containers we use to get your food safely to you, but that's just the start! Choppin' veggies also creates carbon-heavy waste, which we separate from our waste stream and get to another local farmer, who turns those verdant scraps into loamy soil that grows more veggies. He'll often share plants and sprouts he grows from seeds found in our compost buckets, which our crew grows into new planties of their own. High vibe waste streams are a mission at Nourish, and this is one of our favorite parts of it. 

We generate local value and put that value right back into other local, small businesses 

Passionate Nourish chefs make great local food advocates, and while our kitchen is undoubtedly a production space, it is also a classroom, informing the next generation of plant based chefs and food-aware humans that will help make Charlotte NC a more delicious and sustainable city. 

We also have the pleasure of knowing all of the small businesses who's products we host in addition to ours every week - in some cases, there's even some bartering - once again, keeping CLT, NC dollars here and reinvested in community. A cool feature of those micro relationships is that we all help each other improve our offerings by giving feedback and experimenting with their uses in novel ways. 

We deliver fresh, never frozen 

Other than our line of smoothies, seedmilks and tonics (which the NC Health Department requires us to freeze before shipping) we deliver ONLY fresh foods to your doorstep. We believe this preserves the carefully stewarded nutrients in our meals so that you get the maximum nutritional density each dish can provide. Often times, the vegetables making up our meals were picked less than a week before your food gets to you - a timeline only possible in a small, locally focused and aware system like ours.

Whether you're new to Nourish, or a longstanding customer, we thank you for supporting our small operation as we attempt to make the healthiest food we can imagine, in as convenient a fashion as we can. A decade of having the privilege of helping Charlotteans eat more sustainably and ethically without sacrificing flavor is a heck of an accomplishment, and we couldn't have done it without you.

THANK YOU! - Love, Team Nourish  

Ready for more? Check out our series "The Nourish Way" - highlighting some MORE of our favorite features, here! Part One | Part Two | Part Three