MegaFood | March 2018

One of the realities we are up against as a manufacturer is balancing the art of making the best supplements in the world (*insert humble bow here*) with the needs of our planet and the people on it.

As a Certified B Corporation, we are not only aligning ourselves with brands who want to be the best in the world, but we’re also out to be the “Best for the World®”. In order to do so, we declared 2019 the “Year of Waste” and have started to take a hard look at the process and how we can reduce our footprint.

Making our premium products still requires basic resources – things like electricity and heat and water. Awareness, and a little ingenuity, however, can dramatically impact how much of these resources we use.

We’ve talked about our slo-food process and dryers before- despite the fact that they dry the FoodState Nutrients™ that we create, water is a vital part of the process. Our dryers are equipped with a cooling system that cools the foods at the end of the belt to ensure they come away from the dryer easily, and are not heated when they do so. Water runs through the cooling system to – you guessed it – keep the system (and nutrients and foods!) cool, and then that water is discharged (meaning, much like Elvis, it has left the building).

In 2015, we used 3,339,304 gallons of water at the facility that houses our dryers. Of that, 2,479,260 were discharged back to the city. Not so great. We could do better!

Thankfully, MegaFood is comprised of more than a few ingenious folks, and they came up with a solution to match! The fix, in this case, was a recycling water circulator at the end of each dryer. Our team worked with an outside company to develop a system that would work on these unique pieces of equipment. This allows the water used in the cooling system to continually circulate, meaning we’re pulling in less water, and as a result, discharging less water! What does this mean in terms of usage savings?

In 2016, when the recirculating system was installed, we used 1,586,752 gallons of water and discharged 1,234,260 gallons. This was a reduction of 1,244,729 gallons from the year before!

In 2017 we installed a third dryer. Despite the addition, we used 1,794,046 gallons of water but only discharged 1,001,035, reducing usage from the year before by another 243,694 gallons. This was a huge victory not only for us here at MegaFood, but for the ecosystems we impact as well!

Did reading this get you thinking about your own water usage? Here are three tips you can implement right now (no recirculation system needed!) to cut down on the amount of water you and your family are using.

• Repair leaky faucets, indoors and out (one leaky faucet can equate to 2,700 gallons of wasted water per year!)
• Turn off the tap while you brush your teeth (this can waste up to 4 gallons of water!)
• Take shorter showers (A 4-minute shower can use between 20-40 gallons!)

Have more water-saving tips and tricks? Leave a comment or hit us up on social!

This is just the tip of the iceberg for MegaFood (excuse the pun!). We’ve set environmental and social responsibility standards, committed to fair wages, and put legal requirements and provisions in place to ensure sustainability will always be a part of our DNA.