GPI 2011 Friends of Glass • Two Guys in Vermont

Company Name

Two Guys in Vermont

Website

twoguysinvermont.com

Contact Information

Jeff Weinstein
Managing Partner
(802) 778-0673
jeff@twoguysinvermont.com

About Two Guys in Vermont

We are a Vermont food business cooking delicious all natural soups with fresh ingredients using no artificial anything, and we package our soups in glass jars. We have deliberately selected glass jars because glass does not contain BPA. Glass is also quite the sustainable material as it is virtually universally accepted by municipal curbside programs, and re-using glass jars is practical, functional and economical too. Many of our soups’ ingredients come from local family farms. We continue to grow our base of regional farm partnerships. We make our soups in small kettle batch sizes in South Burlington, Vermont.

Glass container recycling/sustainability achievements

Two Guys in Vermont is a new food business, in operation for about one year as of this writing. Although our scale is not significant we are proud to use glass as our food packaging of choice because of its recyclability and re-usability. One of our aims is to create awareness for increasing glass’ recycling rate by offering information randomly or during occasions such as Recycle Glass Month. We also make it a point to suggest various ways of re-using cleaned glass food jars to our social network and in our advertising. Certainly glass is a material that touches upon the three critical elements of sustainability: 1) Recycle, 2) Re-use and 3) Reduce (re-using jars keeps more stuff out of our landfills).

Other Recycling/Sustainability achievements

We recently celebrated our one year in business anniversary. Over this year we have purchased almost five tons (10,000 lbs.) of local farm foods for our recipes! In addition to the superior quality we receive from using these fresh ingredients we have also reduced our reliance on the intense distribution and logistics system, and disproportionate carbon footprint, that transporting agriculture hundreds, even thousands of miles results in. We aspire to participate in an emerging regional food supply-chain that supports family-scale size farms, preserves rural communities and reduces reliance on heavily transported foods. In addition to using safe and sustainable glass food packaging we are committed to drastically reducing personal exposures to pesticide and herbicide residues. We pay attention to the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) “Dirty Dozen” pesticide guide and choose select organic ingredients when a conventionally grown counterpart has been identified as a “worst offender”. We don’t use GMO foods in our recipes and agree with consumer “GMO Right-to-Know” package labeling.

Future Plans

As Two Guys in Vermont continues to grow we hope to be a participant in emerging regional food systems by partnering with local farmers to source our foods. Today we make delicious soups. We will continue to strive to offer remarkably fresh, flavorful and satisfying soup recipes. Our intention is to also expand our food offerings so that we can deliver a diversified range of recipes made with fresh, local foods offered in glass jars.

An overriding element of the Two Guys in Vermont mission is to practice safe food preparation and offer glass as an alternative to other food packaging choices. We eagerly look forward to identifying new food categories that need to come out of the can and into glass!