Eatsy: nourishing ourselves and our community

Eatsy is much more than a lunch break. Our company-wide meal program is another opportunity to practice our values with an initiative that strengthens the ties between our food systems, our communities, and each other. Sharing food and conversation has always been a cornerstone of Etsy culture--from Eatsy’s earliest days, when the entire company would gather around a single picnic table, to the present program, which served more than 60,000 meals in 2015. Eatsy builds topsoil, supports communities, and nourishes all. From menu planning and ingredient sourcing to composting plates and serving up leftovers, Eatsy is intentional, mindful, and fun.

Mindful meals

In our Brooklyn office, where we serve several hundred lunches at a time, our family-style meal translates into a joyous, chaotic buffet. We work closely with our trusted catering partners to plan meals that are nutrient dense, seasonal, and sourced as locally as possible, from farms and purveyors that our Eatsy partners trust. The same holds true in our smaller offices, where we still all fit around a single table (or two).

We serve lunch twice a week, rather than every day, allowing us to be thoughtful about the meals we prepare and keeping Eatsy special. We serve up meals for many other types of occasions, from small team meetings to company-wide parties, seeking out caterers and Etsy sellers to make each event as unique as the food and goods they make.

Giving back to our food system

We strive to minimize waste and make sure materials and nutrients are recycled back into the food system. Avoiding food-related waste such as packaging and disposable servingware is an ongoing effort. We work with our food providers to limit the waste they bring to our offices. We purchase most items in bulk, and use silverware and glassware instead of disposables. While we don’t have the capacity to serve meals on china dishware, we compost our plates and napkins. We also compost most of our organic waste. Several Etsy offices compost 100% of their organics, including our headquarters in Brooklyn.

We use caterers who meet our sourcing and quality standards. Several caterers have grown alongside us, using the steady stream of revenue from Eatsy to expand their businesses and fund new projects. Four of them have even opened their own brick-and-mortar locations.

In 2015 we continued efforts to influence the full supply chain from farm to table, partnering with our caterers to develop local sources for hard-to-find ingredients, such as pasture-raised meats.

We also began sourcing yogurt produced from pastured dairy herds. In Brooklyn, we’re sourcing from Hawthorne Valley Farms in Ghent, NY, and in the UK, we’re sourcing from an organic farm called Yeo Valley that supports the local economy and pays farmers fair wages for their produce. These farms’ production models avoid the problematic whey disposal associated with commercial greek yogurt. The switch to the new yogurts allows us to support local, biodynamic dairy farms committed to using practices that enrich the environment while supplying our employees with nutrition-dense and delicious yogurts.