Our menu items will be made with homemade food.  We will bake our own muffins, scones, fruit breads, and desserts using our recipes that we have been perfecting for over 10 years.  We will make our own sauces, dressings, soups, granola, and ready to eat foods.  We believe that homemade food is more nourishing and delicious than pre-made food.  There is also less packaging and less food miles involved when you make a big batch of soup, store it in 1 gallon buckets, and reuse the buckets instead of throwing them away.  Making our food from scratch allows us to be more flexible with our ingredients and to use seasonal vegetables.  We plan to run this café for a long time, so the menu has to change to keep people coming back.

We believe people should have options when it comes to food and drink.  We will include vegan, vegetarian, wheat/dairy-free and low-fat items.   We will listen to our customers' needs and make specialty items available when we can.  For example, if we have a regular customer who is allergic to one of the ingredients in a burrito filling, we would make efforts to have some filling available without that ingredient.  Or if a customer knows of another product we could sell or another source for one of our ingredients, we would be happy to investigate those potentials.

We have met with Monika Roth of Cooperative Extension to find local sources for products like produce, eggs, cheese, butter, yogurt, chicken and turkey.   She has helped us compose a list of local sources. (See following page.)  Some of the sources we are already buying from for Juna's: Remembrance Farm, Stick & Stone, Regional Access, and Ithaca Soy.   We are looking forward to creating new relationships with the other sources.  We are excited to provide another market for these local farms and create financially beneficial relationships.   We will continue to work with Monika to find the best sources for our menu.

We have contacted the Dilmun Hill Farm manager and will be working with the students to create a relationship where we can use the vegetables produced at the farm.   We envision meeting with the students to find out what they know they can produce consistently and starting there.  After one season of seeing what comes out of the farm, we can make a plan for the next year to increase our use of a certain crop or ask the students to increase the production of something that went well.  The students could set a fair market price, set up a delivery schedule, send out invoices and keep track of the accounting as if it were a for profit business.  This would be a great introduction to the business side of farming with a flexible and forgiving customer!

Operating a sustainable-focused café is a dream of ours.  Using local ingredients and earth-friendly paper goods carries a high financial cost.  The creation of a financially sound business is key to reaching that goal.  We will evaluate all costs and our menu pricing structure frequently in order to maintain the balance of high quality foods and beverages at reasonable prices.