Sustainable style isn't the only thing we are passionate about at Untouched World. Nestled in among our HQ, our workrooms, and our Roydvale Avenue store is Untouched World Kitchen, a welcoming space to enjoy seasonal, locally sourced, free-range food, and winner of the Avenues Magazine Christchurch cafe of the year award three years in a row.
Opened in 1998, UW Kitchen shares the same ethos with our brand, so we take just as much care in sourcing our ingredients as we do our fibres.
The location
UW Kitchen is just five minutes from Christchurch Airport, but the calm, understated surroundings will transport you a world away from the hustle and bustle. Earthy hues and natural materials create a welcoming environment to have a coffee by the fire or sample our current menu. Meanwhile, our native garden is a peaceful spot to enjoy the fresh air and good food.
Because it’s within the hub of our HQ and flagship store, our team regularly heads to UW Kitchen. We love that it’s a space for our whole community, where our team and our customers can mingle.
The menu
Because of our approach to sourcing, our menu changes with the season, but what never changes is our use of healthy, local, free-range ingredients combined to be as delicious as they are nutritious. You can expect dishes such as protein powered omelettes, super salads, filling breakfasts, and sweet treats.
The menu is crafted by our chef around producing refined flavours and hearty dishes, but we consider other factors with sustainability in mind too. For instance, we map our waste from the menu design stage in order to ensure minimal food waste. This involves the chef looking at how every part of the food can be used, so if something doesn’t work in one dish it can be used in another. A simple example of this is frying up carrot peels to use as delicious crunchy garnish on salads.
Minimising waste
As well as waste-mapping at the menu design stage, we plan ahead and buy ingredients in bulk to reduce packaging, and many staples which can be bought packaged and pre-prepared (such as lentils and baked beans) are cooked from scratch instead to reduce packaging further still.
Our piping bags are reusable, and we ensure that all food scraps go into green bins for composting. In 2021, we made the decision to ban the use of single use cups at UW Kitchen. 295 million single use cups are thrown away each year in New Zealand and we didn’t want to contribute to that. Since moving to reusable, we’ve kept over 16,000 coffee cups out of landfill.
We make sure to train our team on sustainable kitchen practices and recycling protocols and as we mentioned in our 2024 Goals journal post, we are creating a more formalised training manual so everyone is working from the same guidelines to maximise our positive impact.
We are also investigating the potential of sourcing milk in reusable jugs which will eliminate the need for plastic bottles. We will keep you updated on that goal.
More than food
Just as we do with the Untouched World brand, we see UW Kitchen as another opportunity to do good beyond the bounds of our business. That’s why we joined B1G1, an initiative that enables business to give back seamlessly, just by running their business as they usually do. The projects B1G1 supports span from human rights protection, clean drinking water to education, all carefully assessed according to a series of robust criteria.
We believe everyone deserves access to basic human necessities – the essentials required to enable a person to thrive and fulfil their potential. We are in the privileged position of being able to help others, so when you buy a coffee, we give a day’s access to clean drinking water to people living in poverty. Since 2018, we have been able to give 206,683 days of clean drinking water.
If you’re planning on dropping by, we recommend booking as tables tend to fill up quickly! To learn more about our Christchurch hub, read about our newly designed flagship store and take a look behind the door of our workrooms.
