Living among giants and facing the effects of one of the nation’s worst economic depressions, Oregon’s Burgerville restaurants are forging ahead without fear. Always paddling against the current in the fast food burger market, Burgerville’s 39 restaurants continue to press the notion of how good fast food can taste, and how sustainable and community-focused their business model can be.

While Burgerville may lack the global heft of its larger burger-slingin’ counterparts, this lack of weight has enabled the restaurant chain to remain nimble, establishing itself as a leader in supporting local economies (and its own business) while crafting a superior menu, in both variety and taste. Their menu has always leveraged the seasonal variation of produce, using Mother Nature –instead of focus groups– to promote menu changes. This month’s seasonal menu features spinach from two local growers, Spring Hill Farms and Stahlbush Island Farms.

The organic baby spinach featured in Burgerville’s Spring Spinach and Chicken Salad comes from Spring Hill Farms, an Oregon Tilth Certified Organic farm in Albany, Oregon. The Food Alliance Certified Spinach in the Spinach Florentine Breakfast Pastry is grown by Stahlbush Island Farms in Corvallis, Oregon. Stahlbush also grows the pumpkins that Burgerville uses for the chain’s seasonal pumpkin milkshakes.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of a little Burgerville bonus when sampling one of their new spinach treats, download this coupon, which adds a free OJ or coffee to the purchase of a Spinach Florentine Breakfast Pastry.

It’s important to mention that the company’s Spring salads also use a good deal of other local and Northwest-sourced foods. The blue cheese comes from Rogue Creamery in Central Point, Oregon. The dried cranberries are locally grown and produced by Meduri Farms, in Dallas, Oregon. The red wine vinaigrette is produced by Litehouse, a family owned company in Idaho. Additionally, the Spinach Florentine Breakfast Pastry features a locally produced pastry using flour made of wheat grown and processed by Shepherds Grain, a Food Alliance Certified sustainable cooperative of wheat farms in Eastern Oregon.

Burgerville has crafted their business around a commitment to practices that buck the fast food trend. They’re striving (and for the most part succeeding) to be the leader in providing fresh, locally sourced, tasty and sustainable fast food. The company has quietly launched several initiatives that are beyond what you might expect from a fast food restaurant, including a corporate-wide purchase of wind power credits, recycling of used cooking oil into biodiesel (by SeQuential biofuels in Salem) –and most recently,  their composting and recycling program, which aims to reduce the chain’s waste sent to landfills by 85 percent. Along with composting and recycling at each restaurant, Burgerville  also developed new standards with its suppliers to improve methods for packaging and managing raw materials at the onset and in food delivery to guests with the goal that most items will never enter the waste stream.

What was initially just a “back of house” operation for kitchens and garbage areas, the composting and recycling program has recently started rolling its way into the guest dining rooms, where adoption may be a bit tougher. The next time you head to the Lloyd/Rose Quarter Burgerville, you’ll notice a series of colorful recycling and composting bins alongside greatly reduced traditional waste bins. The new bins feature colorful signage with clear instructions on how to separate your waste. It’s an important step for a fast food restaurant of any size, and hopefully a mark of changes to come for Burgerville’s far larger, anachronistic competitors.

Sustainable business practices aside, I can’t wait for next month’s seasonal surprise: asparagus.

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• April 16, 2009 — Grease on Earth (2)
• July 3, 2008 — Out of Focus (4)