I was reviewing our expediter interface with Jasper and Chris S (who do an amazing job running our restaurants) and noticed a *lot* of you are ordering your meals from Clover without utensils. This is inspiring!

At one point somebody on our team (I can’t remember who) suggested we make a “no utensils please” option on the app to give customers the opportunity to reduce waste. I didn’t think many would use it but wanted to try anyway. It’s at the checkout screen and you can toggle the switch “on” or “off” depending on whether you need utensils. Turns out a lot of you have flipped the “no utensils for me” switch. Amazing!

Meanwhile our paper costs are through the roof. Pre-pandemic we spent 3.7% of our sales on packaging. Currently we’re at nearly 6%! We’ve seen a lot more “to-go” orders, which leads to more packaging. And packaging is more costly due to supply-chain issues.

I was thinking today that we could default the app to “no utensils for me” and then allow customers to add utensils if they preferred. Some thought that change might frustrate customers who didn’t see the button and assumed they would get utensils, which I can totally understand (having been stranded more than once without utensils when I got takeout).

So we started thinking perhaps we should have the button defaulted on “utensils for me please!” but add a $0.25 fee for utensils. This might encourage more customers to take note of the feature and decide to pass on the utensils. But it wouldn’t leave anybody high and dry if they just happened to overlook the button.

Chris had the idea that we could even add a “last utensils ever” button to allow customers to purchase an affordable set of reusable utensils.

What do you all think? Would love feedback on this idea before we test it in the wild. You can write to us at info@cloverfoodlab.com, chat with the folks in store, or message us on social media.