Bobsy Blog 2020 No. 19

It’s more than just food…it always has been and always will be, at least for me.

“You are all over the city! You are everywhere now!” my friend was telling me the other day. “Yes.” I said, “One Bobsy in our city is more than enough!” we both laughed. This was in response to the recent & current advertising campaign by foodpanda Hong Kong that has made its all over our beloved city, titled “It’s More Than Just Food” in which I am featured striking a pose carrying a MANA! Flat in one hand in a “Food Revolution” salute. You may have seen it already. If you do please snap a photo of the billboards or posters, post them on your Instagram tagging @manafastslowfood, you may well win free MANA! food.

My close friend Matt was asking me what does it feel like to see oneself on large billboards and posters? “Well, it feels strange in some ways & good in others. I don’t reflect on it much and don’t think about it really until I stumble across one and then I go...Oh! Hello there!” I am mostly seeing them through the eyes of other people who are posting them on Instagram or Facebook, with captions and striking different poses in front of them. This is fun to look at and to see how other people react to them. That part I am enjoying for sure. I must salute foodpanda for their vision and insight to create such a campaign that is different to 95 percent of advertising in our city and to approach things from a real and relevant angle that our city can relate too. Real people for real campaigns. Refreshing indeed.

Any observer, observing MANA! over the last nine years of our operations would have visibly noticed that we are more than just food. From day one we have been zero plastic, zero food waste & have invested a lot of time, effort, resources & revenue into being so. In the first 5 years of our operations, we had to deliver all the food scraps & leftovers (food waste) 3 to 4 times per week to a myriad of organic farmers throughout Hong Kong. This of course was a Herculean effort to collect, sort, store, deliver, then repeat in our remarkably busy restaurants. This meant having our van, hiring a driver, toll tickets, parking tickets, speeding tickets, cost of petrol, cost of operating the van, etc. and delivering to way out of the way organic farms. This of course pleased the farmers no end, for them to be getting free plant-based food waste for their compost heaps and building good healthy soil.

For the last 4 years, however, we have hired private contractors to pick up our compost, glass & other recyclables, which has made our life rather easier, but no less expensive and not less committed. We still have to sort, collect, and manage our recycling bins. With the recent opening of MANA! SoHo we have had to redesign and build our 8th bin in our endless efforts to make composting and waste separation for our customer’s dummy-proof. The bins are so labeled and noticeably clear as to what goes where, and it is quite simple in the sense that there are only 3 bins now. We started with 6 bins in 2012 and now we only have Glass, Compost & Rubbish. With the compost bin being the largest and the rubbish bin being the smallest with a large red sign STOP on it. The bins are designed to be customer interactive & educational, with anything from MANA! simply going into the compost bin, except glass. Rubbish we have none, but customers do bring in their own, such as masks, chewing gum, and other disposables. Nothing you purchase in MANA! as a customer goes to landfills. If it’s bought from our stores, then it is zero-waste and will be turned into soil or converted into energy in Hong Kong.

This takes a bit of adjusting from our new customers’ perspective because in HK we have no reliable culture of waste separation and no honest recycling going on. To make matter worse which Legco recently dumped the government’s proposed waste disposal levy plan, as a result our city has taken a mighty step backwards just when it needed the most to take a positive step forwards. So sad! Siiiigh!! So, no wonder our customers get all confused and flustered the first time they have to use our bins because their rational mind is saying one thing and their eyes are reading another. And as the ancient Yogis say, “What the mind doesn’t believe the eyes won’t see.”

Next time you come to MANA! please open your eyes and look, the angels are in the details and details matter a lot to us. As our MANA! Mantra No. 1 goes we must “Eat like it matters.”

Until soon
Bobsy Gaia
Founder of MANA!