Our Chef and sales team work very closely with our local suppliers and farmers in food purchasing and menu planning. We are fortunate to be so close to St Lawrence Market, where our chef meets with suppliers weekly. Some of these suppliers have introduced us to fantastic local products, such as those from Monteforte Dairy and Beretta Organic Farms.
We buy local and in season whenever possible. We are happy to support other local businesses moving toward "greener" attitude using organic and local products. We also suggest local options for beer and wine selection.
In the past years, we have worked hard to provide healthy menus for a large variety of allergies and food preferences- and have made a drastic shift to provide celiac friendly meals for the growing number of celiac and gluten intolerance.
We do as much preserving and cellaring as we can, to try to keep the supply of local ingredients on your plate throughout the year.
Any food products after events are given to the Good Shepherd Shelter (our neighbors).
The UrbanSource delivery vehicle is Flex-Fuel for lower CO2 emissions. We schedule rental and other supplier deliveries as efficiently as possible in order to eliminate unnecessary trips. We encourage our staff to travel to and from events using public transportation by offering TTC tokens and encourage carpooling to eliminating the excess use of vehicles and taxis.
We used as much reclaimed building material as we could find in our recent renovation and even went so far as to have our meeting table built out of reclaimed wood. The table was built by local design team and manufacturer ‘SOUND DESIGN’.
We have retrofitting our light fixtures to compact fluorescent and LED lighting, and the feature lighting are reclaimed fixtures, we also use a programmable thermostat and film has been installed on our glass windows to assist heating and cooling.
Our laundry detergent and cleaning solutions are biodegradable, and we make every effort to purchase multipurpose solutions when possible. All on-site laundry is washed in cold water in our own high-efficiency machines.
The disposables we send out are paper cocktail napkins, biodegradable coffee cups and plastic clamshells for leftover food. Both are made from recycled materials and disposed of in recycling/ green bins. We encourage all our clients not to use disposables and only use reusable rental equipment.
We pack & ship our serving equipment and trays in protective fleece sleeves (made from polyethylene terephthalate) that we had made to eliminate the use of packing paper and bubble wrap.
Paper usage has been reduced drastically in the past 4 years. Invoices are shipped via email unless a hard copy is specifically requested, and our documents converted to digital format. We endeavor to print only the documents needed.
We have worked with our food & beverage suppliers to reduce the use of paper/cardboard boxes to go to a reusable bin system.