I had not ordered Gung Ho in a while and tonight I remedied to that and got their signature lamb pizza. The pizza was great and I want to be fair - hence the 3 stars.
On the other end, the packaging was terrible. It came in an insulated bag made of synthetic fabric, with a metal zipper, an inner foam and aluminum thermal fitting, completed by a handle. The same kind of bag that courriers use to carry food - except that this time the courrier didn't take it back with him, instead he gave it all to me. Add to that: the carton box, the wax paper, the container for the sauce, cutlery and a bag for the salad - and you end up with more trash than food on your table.
So Gung Ho just decided to compete with other restaurants by adding useless packaging... Seriously, what do you expect me to do with an insulated and branded pizza bag? Should I go deliver pizza?!
I really hope other restaurants don't follow with that, we're all sharing the same planet and and it's crazy some businesses think we can just waste like this. If you care a little bit about our environment, please don't order from that place, ordering food is already quite wasteful, no need to waste insulated bags.
The irony which inspired the name of this review is that - written on the very disposable carton box - Gung Ho prides itself with being "environment friendly" and acting on "climate change"... clearly they are. Also if you want to "Help them save our planet" you can buy 10 pizzas, safely store the insulated bags and then exchange them all for a RMB30 pizza. Gung Ho knows nobody will do that - that's why they even staple the receipt on the bag, they know it will end up in the trash, but they simply don't care!
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Comments
Re: "Help us save the planet"
I agree, but wouldn't single them out - though they did invite it with the ostentatious messaging.
Re: "Help us save the planet"
I talked to Jade at Gung Ho a few weeks ago, they do care. In the past couple weeks they've been phasing in new paper-based reduced packaging. For every consumer like you who cares so much about waste, there are 25 who care more about their food arriving in perfect condition, and meeting that expectation in the local delivery infrastructure with the available packaging technologies is harder than you would think.
Re: "Help us save the planet"
Why doesn't Jade from Gung Ho come on here and offer a rebuttal to this PR disaster herself then?
Strange that I can order from Pyro, who don't feel the need to leave all that packaging with you, and my pizza arrives in perfect condition. Seems a bit bizarre, and utterly environmentally careless, and no doubt costly, that they should leave all that useless packaging with the customer.
Obviously, living in Haidian, I don't order from Gung Ho, but I do sometimes go there when in Sanlitun. I won't be in future, though, on general principle.
Re: "Help us save the planet"
Thanks for engaging Gung Ho! on the mater of wasteful packaging. It’s something that we are very passionate about and spend a ton of time researching ways to mitigate.
Firstly I want to state that I do not disagree with you. In fact I would go one step further and say that food delivery is a wasteful practice altogether. No need to go into the reasons behind that as there are more than enough related readings/data online to substantiate that claim. But like many environmentally harmful practices right now (fossil fuels, plastics, palm oil, etc) this is ”the norm” with scalable/effective solutions still being developed. Food delivery is in a similar bind right now, none more so than in China.
I do want to correct you on one mater which is that you can return any of your insulation packaging to any Gung Ho! Pizza delivery guy on any order and do not need to wait until you have ten units. The ten unit rule applies only when you are not ordering from our platform (3rd party) and our drivers can not take them back. (Sorry, we need to make this more clear in our customer coms) In that case we offer a service to go and pick up the re-suable packaging when you reach ten. We encourage you to play your part in NOT throwing out the packaging by offering you a free pizza if you do save them. The other option is that you can drop any number of them off at any Gung Ho! Pizza store at any time.
As to your totally fair question as to why do we use so much reusable packaging in the first place? In short it is due to two reasons brought about with the explosion of 3rd party delivery in 2012 (Baidu, Meotuan, Eleme, etc) In the past all of our pizzas were delivered by our own employees whom where given the tools and training to ensure that your pizza was delivered hygienically and in good condition with minimal packaging. As more and more consumers have moved across to these 3rd party platforms, operators such as Gung Ho! have been forced to join suit, setting up stores on their platforms. The downside is that we are often required to use their drivers who can have different operating standards to ourselves. Of most concern are two alarming scenarios 1) Once the pizza leaves our door we can not control certain Health and Safety issues from the 3rd party driver. There are cases where accidental contaminants from cigarette butts to cockroaches have been found in 3rd party deliveries. Hence for food safety we need to fully seal off our pizza boxes 2) One 3rd party driver will often have several different orders, too many to put inside their delivery box, as a result they will place the pizza at their feet in the middle of the scooter. In a Beijing winter at -15deg this will ruin a warm pizza in minutes as well as obviously exposing it to more contamination scenarios. After careful consideration we decided that neither of these risks were acceptable to our customers and reluctantly moved ahead to seal/insulate the pizza. However rather than opting for a one time use plastic/polystyrene solution (there are ample of the market at much lower costs) we decided to make the best of a difficult situation and go with the more costly reusable option.
Whilst this is neither ideal nor cheap at this point in time it is the best solution we have. That being said we are working tirelessly on the issue and I can share recently that we have been engaged in several initiatives to resolve the mater. Due to our reputation as China’s first and only B Corp Restaurant (The worlds leading Sustainable Development certification www.bcorporation.net) we have been working with Eleme to trial new environmental packaging solutions. Thru group purchasing environmentally friendly packaging solutions Eleme hopes to be able to entice factories to lower their unit costs resulting in a viable, cost effective solution for restaurants. We are also working with a local Social Enterprise in developing a whole new standard of packaging utilizing moldable straw pulp. We hope to share more on these as we look to go to trial at the end of the year.
So whilst we will continue to take measures as a business to mitigate the issue we sorely need customer support on the issue. The best thing you can do is DO NOT order food delivery and go to a restaurant for your pizza fix.(Gung Ho! will offer you "double pizza points" if you only order what you need and leave no waste on your plate) “Refuse” is always the most effective step in reducing harmful practices. If you really need to place a delivery then use the second “R” and “Reduce” by going to our website, NOT a 3rd party one, and asking the Gung Ho! delivery guy to take back with him the re-useable insulation packaging. With these simple steps together we can minimize this issue.
I will save writing too much more here, but I would enjoy meeting you or any concerned reader in person to discus the issue or even better come to one of our regular B Corp meet up events at our Sanlitun restaurant (The most recent was a presentation by Eleme’s Head of Sustainable Development on ecological packaging solutions followed by a Q&A with the 60+ people in attendance) Thanks for your ongoing concern and I hope we and the food delivery industry can make more satisfactory progress on this in the near future.
Best regards,
Jade Gray
Co-Founder
Gung Ho! Pizza
PS: Apologies for the slow reply, the post was just brought to my attention.
Re: "Help us save the planet"
thanks for you post Jade,
its good to see you actually do make a difference towards the environment.
I would like to highlight two isues .
I) I really think you should look at a store in Yizhang, there are a lot of expats here and a lot of Chinese who do welcome western authentic style pizza. The local pizza places are really poor quality and the only competition you have is Dominoes or Pizza hut but that caters to a differ market segment in my view
2) Unfortunately Gung Ho seemed to have cheapened up on the amount of topping you are using. Previously I always order the mussels one (now gone) and one day found to my surprise the mussels were reduced by half. The lady in the shuangjing store said that they use 8 only on a 12" pizza. It is the same with the New Zealand lamb. Looking at your menu just now it seems that your prices have gone up, size come down (11") and you use less toppings.
Many places in Europe pass this lack of toppings as "European style" but to be honest it comes across as a bit stingy given the prices and your operating cost in China.
So I'd like to suggest that you instruct the staff to add more quantity of the same toppings, should the customer request it. i accept if its an additional one, you need to charge. The additional material cost is minimal as labour and operating cost is the same. I know most of my friends and colleagues feel the same now, that is, its just simply not worth paying RMB109 for a pizza when you get can get much cheaper (although quality less) from the main chain stores especially when using a delivery app due to all the discounts available
Re: "Help us save the planet"
Hi Johnny20270
Appreciate your feedback here. I will check out Yizhang for sure, cheers for the heads up. Regarding your concerns around reduced toppings I am not aware of any intentional reduction and there certainly has been no direction given from HQ to do so. Can you please email me on hello@gunghopizza.com the time/place/number you called from for the order you were not happy with if you have a record. If not, then any details would be appreciated as I am personally keen to understand more. We remain proud of the quality and generousity of our servings and offer a Money Back Gaurantee in any instance you are not content with your Gung Ho! order.
Regards,
Jade
Re: "Help us save the planet"
A very interesting conversation above.
The thing I am most interested in is whether than has been any further reply from ghislainsc?
I think the initial message is totally fine (and if I was in your shoes with what the information laid in front of me I would have been thinking the same! "collect 10 and then 1 free pizza!!??" but as we see from Jade's reply there is way more to the story), but I will buy someone a drink who can tell us about another founder of a busy pizza restaurant with multiple locations in Beijing who personally and thoughtfully replies to a concern from a customer in the way Jade did. So, I really do hope that ghislainsc has followed up to show appreciation for the reply.
This waste situation with delivery is really difficult and the fact you can return just 1 reusable pizza container shows that this system could work (and hopefully is working). Has the reusable pizza container been returned yet?
If it hasn't, it REALLY DOES HIGHLIGHT THE PROBLEM! Everyone just wants to blame others for the problem and not stand up and make any effort themselves. I used to complain about the ridiculous amount of waste in my community and the bins over flowing until 1 day I realised "Wait a minute, what can I complain about? What effort am I doing to reduce my waste? I am contributing to these overflowing bins as well." So, I started making many changes in my life, 1 of them being deleting all the Waimai apps from my phone, cooking at home more and getting up off my arse when I wanted to eat something like a pizza and actually go to the restaurant (as Jade has suggested above^)
If Gung Ho! decided to stick with their guns and just use their own delivery drivers they would probably go out of business or have to dramatically reduce their share as these apps, which I think are vile (but, what's also vile is the zero care given by the people ordering this food and then just throwing all these waste into the same bin, no attempt to reduce waste, no attempt to recycle and no attempt to care), are what EVERYONE is using now. They have had to go with the flow and they are trying their very best to adjust and find a solution, it isn't easy. Are any other pizza restaurants doing what Gung Ho! are doing? (a genuine question, I don't know)
If they dropped out, you would have, like how Johnny20270 has drawn attention to a load of "really poor quality" pizza places and no changes would be made to the pizza or delivery industry. Change makers like Gung Ho! are really really needed in the world and any negativity WHATSOEVER from what Gung Ho! are trying to do is completely wrong. They should be praised and helped along the way. I am sure they would LOVE to keep hearing constructive criticism.
You can see from Jade's reply that he and Gung Ho! do care and are probably more than happy to hear this feedback from customers, they will work to make things better. As for the "that's why they even staple the receipt on the bag", yes, that's good and it's great that you've noticed, now that Gung Ho! knows about this they will train their staff even more to ensure they don't do these things. Knowing Gung Ho! they probably already did, but it is difficult getting ALL of your staff to listen to ALL of different things you have trained them on to listen and do them ALL the time.
ghislainsc Thank you for making this review, it has drawn attention to the waste problem and it will only result in progress. I just really hope that we can also learn, forgetting environment for this last point and just zooming in on 1 very important point which is if someone has made this incredibly great effort the right and fair thing to do is also give a public reply, otherwise society will continue to hide behind their computer and phone screens and make comments (and I can see your comment was well intended) that does not lead to progress but will just annoy the people who are trying to change things for the better in this world.
Look forward to your public reply when you have time.
To a zero waste and highly conscious world!
Cheers!
Joe at THE BULK HOUSE
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