An innovative new cafe is giving its customers a truly eco-friendly experience. The Orange Tree at Pugh’s Garden Village in Wenvoe, on the outskirts of Cardiff is like every other ordinary eatery – offering freshly baked cakes, home-made meals and rich, ground coffee.
But unlike others who have only just started to ditch straws, they also give their customers to chance to radically improve their carbon footprint, after implementing a range of environmentally-friendly initatives.
As well as all of their packaging and coffee cups being plastic-free, they also use 100% compostable packaging and are striving to become as energy efficient as possible by installing a log fire to provide heat.
The family-run cafe come garden centre also encourages their customers to take their coffee cups home and plant them in their garden with their free ?Forget me not? seeds – so that they can too be a part of the local environmental campaign.
Visitors have the additional option of taking away their bagged up ground coffee beans to use as fertiliser in their gardens.
The Pugh family, who run The Orange Tree, said: “Composting with coffee is a great way to make use of something that would otherwise end up taking space in landfill. The benefit of using coffee grounds as a fertiliser is that it adds organic material to the soil, which helps support plant growth.”
Aesthetically, the cafe is a green haven complete with a botanical wall, wooden facades, natural features and ambient lighting.
All food is freshly prepared in the kitchen, and where possible using locally sourced, Welsh produce.
As well as lighter bites such as soup, jacket potatoes and sandwiches, customers can feast on home-cooked meals, including Welsh rarebit chicken, Cornbeef slice and hand battered cod and chips.
But there are also gluten free, vegetarian and vegan meal options. In fact, meals can be prepared to specific dietary requirements upon request, thanks to having their own chef on-site.
Little ones have their very own menu, as well as an outdoor play area to escape to, where friendly Terry the Tractor lives.
