Beet Box Veg serves conscious comfort food. Everything is 100% plant-based, made locally. All our products are made in-house, from our hot sauce and Ceasar dressing to our pickles and vegan mayo. Our West End location offers quick-serve, dine-in, take-out, or order delivery. Our sister restaurant in Chinatown is Juke Fried Chicken, providing fried chicken, ribs & cocktails – dine-in, take out or delivery.
Question: How are you supporting other local businesses?
Answer: We support local suppliers and buy local ingredients whenever we can. We make our own plant-based meats and have worked with some local favourite plant-based meats from BC-based BIG Mountain Foods and Tomorrow Foods, and our tempeh is made locally by Tempea Natural Foods. We buy our gluten-free products from Care Bakery, and our regular buns come from Ble Bakery in Vancouver. We use Legends Haul for some of our grocery items, and buy sauerkraut and kombucha from Biota Fermentation. We have local vegan wine from JoieFarm Winery, and we have local, organic, vegan beers from Parkside, Bridge, and Powell Street.
Anything we can make in-house, we do, and we source as many local ingredients as possible. We buy local vegetables in season. We preserve some of them to make our products – for instance, our hot sauce is made with peppers we buy from Zacklan Farms. From Zaklan we buy a year’s supply of their peppers and we bottle it and have it for the whole year. We work with other local farms, but our plant-based menu does limit us slightly in what we can buy locally from Cropthorne and Solested Organic Farms. For our weekly feature sandwiches, our rice bowls, and our salads, we often source directly from local farmers, but it depends on what’s available seasonally based on the time of year.
We buy from local businesses for our services whenever we can. Our insurance provider is local, our accountants are a local couple, our repair and maintenance, equipment suppliers, and tradespeople are all local. For our graphic design, we use Glasfurd & Walker and Andrew McGuire Designs, and for signs and printing, we use Franklin Signs, Signmaster, and Initial Print. We use a Point of Sale system from BC’s Auphan Software, and our packaging is from Tapio in Richmond. When building and renovating, we use Pacific Solutions Contracting and we use local materials and partner with local artists. We worked with a local welder to make our chairs.
We love collaborating with other local brands – every Tuesday we work with a local company on our featured sandwich, “WHAT’s IN MY #beetbox?”. We’ve worked with Tacofino, and the Real Patty Co. It’s great cross-promotion and it gives us something interesting to bring to the West End every week.
Question: What social and environmental practices are you proud of?
Answer: Both of our restaurants are in special communities – the West End and Chinatown. We work hard to be a part of those communities and make all feel welcome. Our approach to food, our staff, and the community are all the same – we want it to be affordable, and we everyone to feel welcome and safe. And our restaurants are safe places for minorities and those in the LGBTQ2S+ community. As a BIPOC owner, I’m conscious of how we hire and who we hire. We pay fair wages and provide benefits to all of our full-time staff. We try to be generous with our team – we feed them, we support them with what they need in their lives, and many of them have been with us for years.
Since day one, we made all our packaging compostable. We keep up to date on the environmental standards and are working with Oceanwise to figure out what the best packaging should be. We need to do the right thing, and the cost can be pretty high for an independent business, but we’ve never compromised on that because we couldn’t sleep at night if we didn’t. We’ve always separated our food scraps from the garbage for composting, and we work with our suppliers to get them to limit the plastics and packaging they deliver to us. We buy plant-based cleaners, the only exception is the sanitizer we’ve had to buy since COVID-19 hit and certain BC-regulated dishwasher materials. We buy our sanitizer locally made from Sons of Vancouver Distillery. Many of our light fixtures, signs, and furniture have been upcycled from TV shows.
We support a lot of local charities. We’ve worked with Vancouver Pride and the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre. We also work with Mealshare, donating meals to youth in need. We send lunches to a low-income, high-risk school in Chinatown, we’ve done some work with Saplings outdoor children’s program, and have done some work with Black Lives Matter children’s charities. We focus a lot on helping kids because we feel that the better off they are, the better our communities is will be.
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