Durham Dairy Bar Offers Sustainable Treats

Summer cravings for ice cream have returned. Luckily the UNH Dairy Bar offers a variety of locally produced ice creams that are as coldly refreshing as they are sustainable. The Durham eatery serves over 20 flavors of Blake's ice cream. Produced in Manchester, Blake's uses high quality local ingredients.

And while the Dairy Bar is proud to carry the Blake's brand, the Durham restaurant is also making a difference with its ice cream containers: All cups and spoons are either manufactured from a corn-based plastic or simply paper, which allows the Dairy Bar to compost dishes and spoons with its food waste.

As if that weren't enough, the Dairy Bar uses Energy Star rated freezers for storing and vending. And, it operates five freezers year round, the energy savings add up.

Other sustainable and local products that are used include Stonyfield Farm yogurt, Hatchland Farm dairy products and Java Tree coffees. There's a big market for local food, and competitors have not been able to provide the same environmental value with their menus as we have, says Dairy Bar Retail Manager Andrew Porter.

The Dairy Bar is operated as a University venture to offer a sustainable menu in an historic setting and it serves breakfast, lunch, and dessert options.

The biggest challenge for the restaurant is finding a large enough quantity of local produce and poultry. Although there is a budding supply of local manufacturers, finding a farm that can supply 80 pounds of chicken a week is a headache, but it's a priority for us so we source our chicken from a humane farm in Pennsylvania, Porter says of the challenges of keeping sustainability front and center at the Dairy Bar.

Our biggest success has been incorporating all of our food waste into the University's compost program. Being a land grant university, UNH has a rich history of composting in both their retail and dining facilities," Porter says. In fact, some of the Dairy Bar's composted food waste is used for landscaping the campus, providing a great example of a closed loop system in action.

UNH students run the composting program, picking it up several times a week. Porter points out that keeping compost from the landfill and having it properly recycled and reused allows the Dairy Bar to significantly reduce its CO2 emissions as well as the amount of methane from plant or animal waste that might be produced if it were just dumped in the landfill along with everything else.

Although the UNH compost program is running strong, there is a lack of commercial composters in the Durham area.  Porter identifies this as one of the reasons that composting has not caught on with more Seacoast restaurants.

The Dairy Bar is a university venture whose budget is based on both retail sales and student meal plan sales. The eatery aims to be profitable and then reinvest those profits back into the business, resulting in a healthy balance of entrepreneurial spirit and environmental values.

For more information on the UNH Dairy Bar, go to www.unh.edu/dairy-bar