Bobsy Blog 2019 No. 16
END OF THE YEAR MESSAGE FOR 2019... MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!
Well, what a surprising year so far! Who would have guessed this could happen in The Good Old HK. It hasn’t exactly been a typical year for our beloved city of Hong Kong has it !? With the successful and well-attended elections last weekend on November the 24th, our city has collectively breathed a sigh of relief. A pause perhaps, or a long term solution. A window of opportunity has opened for both the Government and the people. It’s time now to throw flowers not bricks and time to burn candles not molotov cocktails. Anyways, enough politricks for now.
This year has turned out to be quite the year for our fledgeling Brand.
It started off with us reaching an impressive landmark of selling 1,000,000 Flats in January. That is 1 Million signature Flatbreads sold! Making it one of HK’s best selling items of food.
2019 continued with a major breakthrough in our main mission-led-challenge at MANA! and that is to finally be able to compost all our packaging together with our food waste. All customer leftovers, kitchen scraps & cuttings etc, are collectively known as “food waste”. This might not sound like much to the casual observer. Still, for any restaurant, hotel, cafe, hospital, school or even University to be able to compost, that means turn into soil, all of its packaging & its food waste locally is quite the achievement. This has taken many years of hard work and diligence, and for anyone who has visited MANA!, this enormous challenge would have been apparent.
We finally managed to close this loop. Mission accomplished!
Another significant milestone for us was the opening of our 1,600 SqFt MANA! Starstreet location in July. A larger version of MANA! with table seating, a V-Coffee Bar, a Salad Bar, Organic Booze Bar and a chill out Zen Den. We are very proud of what we have built. This took many years to achieve and is a showcase of how we wish to grow our community moving forwards.
Another first for our city and perhaps any restaurant anywhere, is that we now put out monthly sustainability reports, sharing our eco data with our members & the public alike.
On November the 1st, we launched our press release: “HK, we’ve got a Coffee Problem!” This campaign aims to move the narrative away from plastic straws towards the ubiquitous plastic coated coffee cups and lids that every coffee shop is pumping out like there is no tomorrow.
This is a pet-peeve for me personally as it somehow disturbs me and annoys me to see educated people drinking their multiple coffees time & time again in the single-use plastic-coated cups and lids. Yet we have solved this challenge and are serving our signature V-Coffees in fully compostable & biodegradable coffee cups. Mission accomplished!
As the year peters out towards 2020, I strongly feel our HK will emerge from these challenging times of social & political unrest, stronger, healthier & more united than ever before. Likewise MANA! will grow into 2020 and the new decade of the ‘20s as a stronger Brand with more clarity around its core mission-led-business of changing the world one flat at a time & one bite at a time.
As our 7th MANA! Mantra goes “We are not on the planet for business, we are in business for the planet.” Mission accomplished !? Perhaps, perhaps not, but we are certainly on our way.
Until soon…
Bobsy Gaia
