Old town café offers healthier, fresh alternatives

When Mama Bear’s Café opened two years ago, its owners wanted to offer a new and healthy food market.

“(Co-owner of Mama Bear’s) Eugene Hall felt like when he went out to eat in town, he wasn’t really finding anything healthy or fresh to eat. He just wasn’t impressed with the quality of food as far as small, quick service restaurants,” said Cecilia Garcia, co-owner of Mama Bear’s Café, 1224 Turner St., in Lansing.

When Hall approached Garcia with the business proposal, Garcia jumped at the opportunity to use more biodegradable and recyclable packaging as well as organic and local ingredients, which is something other restaurants Garcia worked for hadn’t used.

“I was kind of fed up with normal food service from an environmental aspect because I’m pretty involved with environmental issues and eating healthy,” Garcia said. “I felt like every restaurant I worked for (was) trying to do healthier stuff, but as far as a recycling standpoint and trying to reduce their environmental impact, no one was really doing what I thought should be done.”

In order to remain fresh and healthy, most items are made from scratch instead of ordering pre-made items that come in nonrecyclable packages.

“Sometimes it costs a lot more, but we take our packaging to the recycling station,” Garcia said. “You get a lot of people ordering food because they’re cheap and a lot of times they’ll order produce from California, when we have amazing Michigan farmers here.”

Lansing resident Nathan Sieggreen has worked at Mama Bear’s Café since it opened.

“I like what they’re trying to do for the local community,” Sieggreen said. “I’ve worked at other places and there aren’t many places left that care about it. Recycling is an easy step.”

The fresh food is what first caught Lansing resident Ryan Taylor’s attention when he first started frequenting the restaurant.

“The food is real and it’s not frozen, right off the truck and heated up,” Taylor said.

Since extra steps are taken in order to maintain a local and environmentally friendly business, there have been some financial setbacks since they are spending more money to use ingredients that aren’t the easiest to find and order since there are fewer of the organic farmers.

“When we went into this, we knew we would never be rich, it was just kind of job security for me and a good steady place for Eugene to eat,” Garcia said.

Because of the economy and extra costs for organic and local products, there have been cuts. Garcia and Hall have had to cut items offered based on how well they sold and they watch
how much food is wasted.

“We’re just really being vigilant about food waste and making sure the staff is not wasting products,” Garcia said. “If someone messes up an entire batch of soup, you notice that it hurts you a lot more than before.”

Even if the cuts don’t end up being enough and Mama Bear’s Café has to close, Garcia said they are proud to have been able to survive for this long since they started the business with their own money and didn’t take out a loan.

“We opened our doors during a poor economy with no money in the pocket,” Garcia said.

“We never ended up getting financing from anyone because all the lending had stopped. The fact that we’ve been able to survive for two years in a bad economy with no money to start with, we’re all
very impressed. It’s like we pulled a big rabbit out of the hat.”