About the food & sustainability in Wellamo
Sustainability
Sustainability has built in everything we do. It determines and shows in every part in our business starting from owners to all individual employees and to producers - sharing the same values - sustainable future. We are participating with a lot of producers around Finland trying to continue working with ethical and sustainable values.
We want to build our business around of sustainable values in every process. We keep that in our key thing of our success and highly believe that we have safe working environment for everyone.
Produce & Food
Local, organic, wild and seasonal products and producers are the basis of the food in Wellamo. Everything that is in a natural growth season, is in a use of Wellamo's kitchen and menu. The menu is based on plant-based with vegetables and root vegetables of the season, filled with high quality proteins including meat/poultry/game, fish/seafood and vegetable proteins. There is always a vegan menu available with separated dishes that could be done vegan. We want to highlight the expensive and high quality produces as they should be - not other way around. We use only producers/hunters who cares about animal welfare and shares the same values with us.
Also we are using a lot of wild and foraged produces during all year and preserving those for further use and also sharing the knowledge of using wild food. Dani is foraging mostly everything to our use and participating with other foragers in different seasons. Summer season is the busiest so we can preserve the produces for the winter time so we can enjoy them all year. We are also sharing our knowledge to producers and having meetings about their produces and the processes behind their produce to the menu or a dish. We let all ingredients to shine as their own and using seasonings only to push the flavors to the max behind every product or produce. Salt to taste, apple cider vinegar to blast the flavors and organic oils to completing the palette.
All the meat-fish-poultry is coming from Finland and is from 100% sustainable sources.
Working environment
From the start we have been wanting to create high quality restaurant and work environment for every one - to customers and for staff. Everyone working with us is shared about company values and employees are sharing the values. Every member brings something inspiring to the environment. Everyone working together towards to our goal to be beautiful place to work and show the industry that reasonable working hours and responsibilities are possible - especially in Wellamo. Also we really think that everyone working with in this working environment should be allowed to be heard, feel safe and all equal to one another.
We have managed to do 4-5 day working week with reasonable 8 hours per day - it doesn't matter do you work in the morning or dinner service. Every three week you have weekday or Saturday day-off. With this we enable to manage that employees could have enough rest, free time and sleep during a week. Every employee is part of every process in the restaurant and every section. Because in the small kitchen we can rotate everyone in different sections in and let everyone shine with their own skills and also improve in everyday basis.
Recycling and preparation process -
We have been working closely with every producers and wholesaler about minimize packaging waste or shipping boxes. We've centralized our deliveries that we minimize the resulting climate harm. Every shipping boxes is re-used by producers in the next deliveries. Also we have managed to get rid of every plastic around any produces that we receive.
Every ingredient or produce is used in a way that it doesn't leave food waste. Stems, roots and leaves are used or prepared somehow - dried, fermented, preserved or to add more flavors to stocks, glazes and broths. Recycling in Finland is also very strict and controlled by the city so we are recycling everything in high standards. Also we don't use anything single-plastic items in the kitchen excepts vacuum bags which we aim to change.
We want to be at the forefront of constantly changing the restaurant industry for the better place to work and make a progress!
Owner & Executive chef
Dani Hänninen
dani@wellamo.fi