Kettle Brand Foods ‘Chip In’ with Sustainable, Eco-Friendly Practices

I already love to eat Kettle brand chips. Ironically, I never even enjoyed potato chips until earlier this year when I absentmindedly snacked on a bag of Kettle Tuscan Three Cheese chips at a media event I was attending: From that moment on I was hooked. Since then, I’ve sampled many of the flavors in their line, always delighted by their wonderful crunch and delicious flavors.

Only recently, I happened to notice verbage on the packaging that drew my attention to the company’s sustainability efforts and was pleased to discover the company supports a variety of eco-friendly practices. In fact, green building, renewable energy, habitat restoration, recycling, and reuse make up the pillars of Kettle Foods’ environmental initiative! Awesome practices contribute to their awesome chips!

The new 73,000-square-foot Kettle Foods factory in Beloit, Wisconsin, is the first food manufacturing facility in the U.S. to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)  Gold-level certification for green building. On top, the building features 18 wind turbines that generate enough energy to produce 56,000 bags of Kettle Brand Potato Chips every year – or approximately 28,000 kilowatt hours.

The Kettle Foods headquarters in Salem, Oregon, is home to one of the largest commercial solar power arrays in the Pacific Northwest. As a producer of renewable energy, Kettle Foods’ 616 solar panels generate 120,000 kWh of electricity annually – enough to make 250,000 bags of Kettle Brand Potato Chips each year, and reduce Kettle Foods’ annual CO2 emissions by 65 tons.

When Kettle Foods’ headquarters moved to Oregon in 1999, the company set out to restore a federally designated natural wetlands on the company grounds.  Invasive non-native species including Himalayan blackberry bushes and Scotch Broom were removed and the grounds were replanted with native plants such as Aster, Camas, Red Alder, Lupine, and Sword Fern in addition to aquatic plant species such as Wapato and Marsh Pennywort which enhance biological diversity in the wetland pond.

To encourage employees and community members to enjoy the newly restored wetland, Kettle Foods created a public trail system with benches and installed interpretive signs describing plant and tree species and identifying the various birds and animals living on the grounds.

As a result of their efforts over the past five years Kettle Foods has welcomed back a wide variety of native plant species and watched the local wildlife flourish. Great Blue Herons have returned to the wetland and have nested on site since 2000. The birds are a favorite sight for both visitors and employees.

Kettle Foods is committed to biodiesel, a renewable fuel resource that greatly reduces tailpipe pollution as compared to regular diesel, creates local jobs, and reduces dependence on foreign oil.  All waste cooking oil is processed into biodiesel which is used to operate three “Bio-Beetle” company cars plus a local delivery truck — resulting in an annual reduction of 8 tons of CO2 emissions.

Kettle recently eliminated the paper layer of its chip bags and now uses an all-poly material which now allows its packaging to be recycled. By making this change, the company will save over 22,000 trees annually and prevent more than 450,000 pounds of packaging from going into landfills each year

Get this: NONE of Kettle Foods’ agricultural waste enters the waste stream.  Everything from uncooked corn and raw potatoes to finished potato chips that don’t make the grade goes to companies that use it either for composting or for animal feed.

And if that’s not enough, every year Kettle Foods recycles over 360,000 pounds of cardboard, 10,000 pounds of plastic stretch wrap, 9,000 pounds of magazines and office paper as well as glass, metal, paint, fluorescent light bulbs and “techno trash” such as computer components, video tapes and CDs.

Beyond these eco-friendly production methods, the company is very proud of its community giving plans, and since its early days in 1978, has looked for ways to help its neighbors. Today, the company donates money, product and time to organizations around the country, whether donating chips for fundraising events at local schools to volunteering employee time at area non-profits. Plus, every year Kettle Foods gives more than 175,000 pounds of potatoes to local hunger relief agencies and more than 1700 cases of Kettle Brand products to organizations such as The Wetlands Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation. Think of it as “chipping in.”

So now, the only reason I have to feel guilty about indulging in Kettle Chips is my current diet. Of course, on my plan, everything is allowed in moderation, so even that is a small concern!

(Photos used with permission of Kettle Brand Chips. Disclosure: eCyclegroup has not received any compensation for writing this content and has no material connection to the brand mentioned herein.)

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Tags: Alternate Fuels/Energies, Biodiesel, EcoFriendly Alternatives, Food, Green Products, Recycling, Solar