A Big Win for MoCo’s Founding Farmers

Last night, Co-Owner Dan Simons and our team were thrilled to accept the Maryland Green Registry’s Leadership Award for MoCo’s Founding Farmers from Maryland Secretary of the Environment, Ben Grumbles, and the Maryland Department of the Environment.

This big win is a big deal for our team. The Leadership Award is given to only five businesses annually that are committed to sustainability, with clear, measureable results of impact on our planet, or in our words, to do more good and less harm.

Our Leadership Award-winning team at MoCo’s Founding Farmers estimates that 90% of our restaurant’s waste is diverted from landfills, as certified by the Green Restaurant Association. Yup, 90%.

How do we achieve this? 

We stay true to our farmer-owned company, Farmers Restaurant Group’s sustainability mission, every day. We reuse, recycle, and most importantly, reduce as much as we can. We composted roughly 280,800 pounds of food waste last year. To reduce our plastic and glass bottle use, we make our sodas from scratch, we developed a craft beer program showcasing small-batch draft beers, and we have served free, filtered water in reusable glass bottles since day one. We use bio- and marine-degradable straws and built a coalition-turned-non-profit, Our Last Straw, to eliminate the use of plastic straws beyond the walls of our restaurant. In fact, here at MoCo’s Founding Farmers, we prevented more than a quarter of a million plastic and glass bottles and more than 300,000 plastic straws from entering our area’s waste stream in 2018 alone. 

We thank the Maryland Green Registry for this recognition and Governor Larry Hogan for supporting the program and creating a Maryland Green Registry Day. We congratulate our fellow Leadership Award winners, The Baltimore Convention Center, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, the Inn at Horn Point, and The Heart of the Earth Sanctuary and Rescue, Inc. for their continued commitment to implementing measurable sustainability practices across their organizations as well, every day.   

*photo: Co-Owner Dan Simons accepting the Maryland Green Registry Leadership Award from Maryland Secretary of the Environment Ben Grumbles, with our very own Founding Farmers green team, Julie Sharkey and Erin Chalkley.