`In One Brooklyn Bakery, On-Tap Olive Oil Helps Ditch Plastic - Olive Oil Times

In One Brooklyn Bakery, On-Tap Olive Oil Helps Ditch Plastic

By Shayan Saalabi
Oct. 28, 2019 15:38 UTC

At an Italian a restau­rant and bak­ery in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neigh­bor­hood of cen­tral Brooklyn, canned and bot­tled olive oils are being nixed for an on-tap expe­ri­ence.

Saraghina pro­vides shop-goers with a green-tinted glass bot­tle that they then fill and refill them­selves with Italian olive oil. By fore­go­ing sin­gle-use can­is­ters, Saraghina’s olive oil is not only sus­tain­able and envi­ron­men­tally friendly, but pro­motes a local loy­alty around the oil and where Brooklynites get it.

It’s nice to have some­place local to fill up on olive oil and not have to dump empty bot­tles every other week.- Jordi Ng, a cus­tomer and local res­i­dent

We get our olive oils in five-liter tins that we use to fill the fusti that our cus­tomers can then use to fill up their own bot­tles,” Anne Hoberg, man­ager of Saraghina’s bak­ery since its open­ing in early 2014, said.

What ini­tially drove Hoberg to opt for on-tap olive oils was not nec­es­sar­ily reduc­ing Saraghina’s eco­log­i­cal foot­print, but to offer pre­mium olive oils at a reduced price point, about $18 for 750 mil­li­liters.

See Also:Sustainability News

It’s so much eas­ier for the pro­ducer to pack­age their olive oils in a tin than in indi­vid­u­ally pack­aged bot­tles,” Hoberg said. It can lower the price of each olive oil by over 50 per­cent.”

Sitting in these stain­less steel fusti, atop a two-tiered trol­ley with tinted glass bot­tles and refill­able tins under­neath, Saraghina offers two olive oils: one from Puglia and the other from Pianogrillo. The Puglia oil is sourced from the Brooklyn-based importer Marovato and the Pianogrillo is sourced from the Bronx-based importer Gustiamo.

Both of our olive oils come from importers that we know very well,” Hoberg, who worked at Gustiamo before join­ing Saraghina’s staff, said. Both source their prod­ucts from small, fam­ily-owned farms that you can­not find else­where in the United States.”

When han­dling their olive oils, Hoberg said that the goal is not to impact the taste.

We keep all of our olive oil tins in the back of our store where sun­light is lim­ited,” she said. We use stain­less steel drums. We source dark, tinted-green bot­tles so there’s no sun­light affect­ing the oil once it’s been poured.”

In a city that was recently found to have more lit­ter that any other in the U.S., Saraghina’s refill­able olive oils have seem­ingly sat­is­fied both the taste­buds and con­sciences of their shop­pers.

Their oils always taste so fresh,” Jordi Ng, a cus­tomer and Bedford-Stuyvesant res­i­dent, said. It’s nice to have some­place local to fill up on olive oil and not have to dump empty bot­tles every other week.”

Maybe Saraghina’s efforts are signs of a trend toward a refill­able life, but for now, it just makes sense for Hoberg

I mean, any­thing that helps you re-use pack­ag­ing while still hav­ing a high-qual­ity prod­uct is great,” she said.





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