Skip navigation

Big Bowl yanks bottled water from menu

CHICAGO The Big Bowl chain said it would forgo about $25,000 in annual profit by discontinuing the sale of bottled water, the latest in a series of environmental moves by the eight-unit holding of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.

Dan McGowan, president of the full-service Asian brand, said serving bottled water is a wasteful practice because the containers are manufactured, transported and then often trashed rather than recycled. Some 38 billion discarded water bottles end up in landfills every year, he said.

Forgoing the lucrative margins provided by selling bottled water will not have much of an overall impact on profits, McGowan said. Big Bowl promotes its house-made ginger ale and offers a variety of other alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. Tap water will continue to be provided for free.

In May, Big Bowl announced that it was switching to ecofriendly server uniforms made in part from bamboo. McGowan indicated at the time that the new outfits would cost four times what Big Bowl had been paying for conventional uniforms.

The restaurants are located in Chicago, Minneapolis and Reston, Va.

Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish