Farmers Market Vendor Has Unique Approach to Back-to-School

The Madison Farmers Market’s focus is typically fruits and vegetables, but on some weeks, non-food vendors purchase a table to take advantage of the constant foot traffic moving up and down Waverly Place.

One such vendor on recent Thursdays is everydayJun, a business formed by two working moms Nancy Poletti and Justine Segal, who began to rethink the way they dealt with waste on a daily basis. When the two began to see how important the concept of a reusable container was in the waste cycle, everydayJun was born.

The concept for the business was born out of conversations that Poletti and Segal would have on the train while they commuted to New York. Poletti’s background is in marketing. Segal’s in finance.

“We knew that we wanted to do something green and looked at our own lives to see what small steps we could take," Segal said. "Lunch was always a problem for us, finding things to fit in a lunch bag that we could reuse."

Segal said she noticed that moms had to manage multiple containers for lunch for their kids and was concerned with the vast amount of trash being produced at lunchtime.

Their main product is a black nylon bag that features a front panel that is customizable based on any number of designs available known as The Waste Free Lunch Kit. The panel is secured by a perimeter of Velcro and can be swapped with additional designs.

Smart marketing or just the desire for exposure, it goes without saying that everydayJun’s product line is ideal for a back-to-school purchase. The Waste Free Lunch Kit is a neoprene messenger-style lunch bag with a removable front panel, an "origami-esque" food container and a coordinating beverage bottle and spoon-fork, or spork. Inside the lunchbox there is room for a BPA-free beverage bottle.

New this year are snack bags in a variety of designs.

Each bag retails for $42, an amount that many parents could easily spend on associated lunch wrappings, which head to landfills. Additional panels are sold for $9.95. everydayJun can be found on the Web at www.everydayjun.com.