In go the coffee grounds, out comes the fertilizer at popular Denver eatery Snooze. Here’s the science behind the “magic.”

In the bustling kitchen of Denver’s brunch juggernaut Snooze, Adam Schlegel bends over a trash can brimming with spent coffee grounds, cantaloupe rinds and leftover eggs Benedict, hoping that he is staring straight into Colorado’s green future. 

Schlegel ties the ends of the compostable bag liner together, carries the slop out into the equally bustling parking lot at 7th and Colorado between Snooze, Trader Joe’s and Anthony’s Pizza, and pulls open a hatch cut into the side of a rainbow-painted storage container. 

Plop inside go the coffee grounds and other detritus. Importantly, no rank odors or clouds of flies come out. Somewhere inside the steel box, over the next few days, biological magic happens.

And then, 15 feet away, rich liquid plant fertilizer flows from a plastic nozzle, is bottled, and put on sale across the country. 

“Bam!” as Emeril Lagasse likes to say: Solved all at once are Snooze’s city-mandated waste diversion challenges, and the public’s desire to turn enormous volumes of food waste into useful compost. 

“It does seem a little bit too good to be true,” said Schlegel, chief growth and strategy officer for the Snooze restaurant group. “That sounds like my CFO … but man, I’m so excited about where this could go. And I hope we and as many other people as possible can start leaning into this, because it’s a real opportunity in our cities and beyond, and I think that they’ve helped unlock it.”

Ecotone Renewables is the company delivering the colorful, seemingly magical shipping container to restaurant parking lots. A couple of times a week, an employee walks into the container, opens up the organic waste bags deposited by Snooze, Anthony’s and other businesses on the block, and fills a biodigester. The Ecotone process results in a concentrated plant fertilizer available online as Soil Sauce. 

Snooze is negotiating to try a smaller version of the biodigester outside its RiNo location. Schlegel hopes Ecotone will make a go of it and be dropping its magic factories in the parking lots of restaurants, grocery stores and other food processors across Colorado. 

Pushing the revolution in restaurant food handling is Denver’s new waste diversion laws. Recycling and composting service to individual homes has long been provided by city employees. After a citywide vote, landlords were required to extend recycling and composting services to businesses and apartment buildings as well, with the goal of improving Colorado diversion rates that lag far behind other states. 

But the services are expensive, and come on top of other costs such as relatively high minimum wages that restaurateurs complain are making Denver one of the most expensive cities to operate. Separately hauling Snooze’s food waste from the 700 block of Colorado Boulevard would have cost $500 to $1,000 a month, Schlegel said, adding a $10,000 annual cost amid inflationary times. 

The waste hauler agreed to a discount, and Snooze uses the savings to pay Ecotone, Schlegel said. Soil Sauce bottles are for sale behind the Snooze greeting station and cash register, for the perusal of customers in the traditionally long brunch lines snaking out the door on Sunday mornings. 

The trailer in place since July has worked so well — handling 900 pounds of food waste a week with capacity for 1,000 pounds — that Snooze and site landlord Kentro Group signed a five year pact. 

“Over a year, the system is expected to avoid about 120 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions, comparable to the carbon captured by 5,000 mature trees,” Ecotone says. 

Snooze certainly has advantages in such innovative projects because of its higher revenue and loyal customers, Schlegel said, literally knocking on wood paneling behind the bar. Recognizing that, the company wants the smaller pilot project in RiNo to show more modest restaurants the way forward. 

“The city is requiring us to figure out a solution,” Schlegel said. “And that smaller-footprint unit will really open up the doors for everybody to jump in and do it.”