Sustainability Buzz

Skinny Jake’s Fat Honey

Next time you visit the maker space, be sure to look up. You’ll see colorful wooden boxes through a glass skylight. These are bee boxes, stands that contain hives that are accessible to beekeepers.

Those rooftop hives belong to Skinny Jake’s Fat Honey, a local honey purveyor. The business began in 2011 with a single backyard hive in Northeast Minneapolis. There is a real Jake, the company namesake and founder, who realized that his hobby produced such a unique nectar that it needed to be shared. The company now has dozens of hives on rooftops and in backyards across the area churning out the tastiest, fattest honey in Minnesota. Skinny Jake explains, “This isn’t your regular kinda honey. This is the condensed nectar of the urban jungle, pulsing with aroma and flavor like a flowery summer nebula. Every drop is a universe of flavor.”

That is exactly why Baker’s Field Flour & Bread bakes with this very special, ultra-local urban honey. In addition to benefits of keeping our honey supply close, we hope that by supporting a home for bees in our neighborhood, these pollinators will improve the biodiversity of our yards and parks and make Northeast Minneapolis a more beautiful, colorful place to live. Skinny Jake’s Fat Honey is available for purchase at Kieran’s Kitchen, plus fine restaurants, cafes, and shops in the area. 

Farmed Near, Made Here

Another important way we can reduce our impact on the environment is by decreasing the distance that our food has to travel. By creating direct partnerships with farmer partners in Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, we eliminate unnecessary links on the farm to table journey and decrease the overall food miles for our production businesses.

Solar Panels

Though they can’t be seen from the building, 78 solar panels cover the roof above the maker space. These panels convert energy from the sun into electricity for the building.

Each panel is made up of photovoltaic (PV) cells, made from layers of silicon, a semi-conducting material. Different elements are added to make each layer of silicon either positively or negatively charged, and this difference in charges creates an electric field between the layers. When a particle of sunlight - a photon - hits the solar panel, it knocks an electron free. The electric field moves this electron out of the silicon layers to the metal plate surrounding the PV cell, where it is collected with all of the other free electrons and transferred to wires to move just like other forms of electricity.

In 2019, FOOD BUILDING's 78 solar panels generated more than 30,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. To put this number into perspective, the average Minnesota home uses around 9,000 kWh each year, so our panels provided enough energy to completely power three homes! While it’s not quite enough to cover all of the energy needed for our food production spaces, these panels remind us of the small things we can do to have big impacts in making our products and our choices more sustainable.

Eco-llaboration

Beyond these more visible efforts towards sustainability, we are always working to become more eco-friendly at FOOD BUILDING through the decisions we make as individual businesses, and as a whole.

One of the biggest impacts we can have on our carbon footprint is in reducing our waste, and often we find that “waste” for one business can actually add value to another. When we can’t find another use for our food waste at the building, we make sure that it is composted or recycled whenever possible.

Building Sustainability

We know that there’s always room for improvement when it comes to the environment. If you have any creative ideas for us about ways we could improve the sustainability of our building or our businesses, we encourage you to reach out to us at info@foodbuilding.com.