
Bio
Dan Swenson-Klatt has been running Butter Bakery Cafe for the past 18 years. In 2012, through a partnership with Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative, they moved to their current location at the corner of 37th and Nicollet in Southwest Minneapolis. They are a family-run business that aims to foster community connections through their work. Butter Bakery is an advocate for sustainability, community building, and equity for workers.
Sustainability
Before kickstarting Butter Bakery, Dan had extensive experience in a variety of forms of education around the Twin Cities. While serving as an educator for Outward Bound, he developed a deeper passion for sustainability and caring for the Earth. As Dan transitioned to the restaurant space, he knew it was crucial to incorporate the “leave no trace” mentality into his vision. The main avenue for leaving no trace is by reducing waste produced by the cafe and customers. The cafe offers compostable foodware, reusing food scraps, and composting waste. When the pandemic hit, they realized how little they knew about how much was being wasted outside of the cafe’s four walls. Dan began to ask himself:
“Can we think of ways to reduce as a part of what we’re doing? To reduce the single-use waste activity? We do offer folks the ability to bring things in for reuse, but how about offering it ourselves for folks who aren’t carrying their own container?”
Dan reiterated the importance of food donations and composting, but also emphasized the importance of reducing food waste in the first place. A crucial piece of their reduction strategy is to track the volume of food waste they are creating on a daily basis. From these numbers, they are able to identify where they may be misusing their food and plan better for the future. The next step for the cafe is to expand their capacity for reusable materials for their customers to continue minimizing the creation of waste.
Community
Throughout our conversation, Dan emphasized how important community was when creating Butter Bakery. In fact, their current space was made possible through funding on behalf of Beacon, a collaborative that focuses on creating affordable housing for safer communities. He explains:
“We are in a neighborhood zone that wants this as well. That wants to be a little more green. How do we do that for themselves as residents, but also as consumers?”
Advice
This sense of community extends to not only residents, but also other business owners. As someone who has been in this industry for nearly two decades, Dan had insightful advice for those who are getting started in this sphere. Starting in 2006, there weren’t many models for sustainable restaurants to turn to for inspiration.