At Nugget Markets, we’re all for farm to fork AND the other way around! Three years ago we started partnering with California Safe Soil (CSS) in West Sacramento to bring the cycle full circle. Their processing facility turns our food scraps into fuel used to create H2H (Harvest-to-Harvest) fertilizer, which farms use for growing even more produce.

The beauty of this process is it returns nutrients from the food scraps back into the soil of local farmland. According to CSS, H2H fertilizer reduces the need for other fertilizers and creates yields that are 30-40% higher in leafy crops and strawberries. Water retention of soil is also higher, reducing the need for irrigation by 25%.

CSS began collecting food scraps from our West Sacramento store as a trial program in 2013. Soon after, our stores in Woodland and Davis joined in the program and started providing food scraps later that year. In early 2014, our Sacramento and Elk Grove stores started participating in the program, too.

Since we began partnering with CSS, Nugget Markets has diverted more than 3.1 million pounds of food scraps, which have been used to create enough H2H fertilizer to cover more than 7,750 acres of local farmland! Since many of the local farms we purchase from use the H2H product, the cause goes full circle.

We are so grateful to be able to partner with CSS to create such a strong, positive impact across the board. And the best part is, we’re just getting started!