​Making it in the restaurant industry is no easy task. According to a study by Ohio University, 80% of new restaurants fail in the first five years. So, what does it take to be in that top 20%? Many food blogs and restaurant gurus will tell you that it's a numbers game: efficiency, planning, and good accounting being paramount. They certainly wouldn't be wrong. However, Boston-based b.good is doing much more than that.

After twelve years of growth, opening their doors at 40 locations (including one in Switzerland) and garnering dozens of awards and accolades, here are some of the ways b.good is setting the new standard for successful, community-focused business.

1. Make the most of your mistakes.
Can you turn your mistakes into opportunities? How about into a farm, on an island? After making a mistake on a catering order for a large summer camp located on Long Island in Boston Harbor, b.good visited the camp to make amends in person. In talking with the camp staff, a vision was formed to use abandoned land on the island to grow food. Just a few months later, b.good is running Hannah Farm on the property and donating 75% of what they grow back to the summer camp and to communities in need. The rest goes back to b.good's restaurants and prep kitchens, where the scraps are picked up to be composted. The finished soil is then delivered back out to Hannah Farm, completing the food loop.

Wahoo! Earlier this week, CERO composted it's two millionth pound of food waste. With nearly three months still to go in 2016, we've diverted more than 150% of what we did in all of 2015. The road to this point has been full of challenges, and we are both thrilled and proud to hit this milestone. We couldn't have done it without our incredible partners like America's Food Basket, Wegmans, Dudley Dough, Daily Table, Tropical Foods, DiSilva Fruit, b.good, The Frogmore, Fairsted Kitchen, Boston Public Market and countless others. Y'all are rockstars.

According to a 2015 UW-Madison study, landfilling one ton of food waste results in the emission of 0.71 tons CO2e. This is due mostly to methane emissions that are produced when food waste is buried and forced to break down under anaerobic conditions (no oxygen). On the other hand, composting a ton of food waste results in a net reduction of 0.24 tons CO2e, due to carbon sequestration. This means that for every pound of food waste composted, we are effectively putting carbon back into the ground. It sounds too good to be true, but nature has been doing it for millions of years!

​When food breaks down under natural conditions, the nutrients are returned to the soil to be used by future plants. This creates a sustainable cycling of nutrients, which is what CERO strives to do. This is in direct opposition to landfilling, which leaves these nutrients stranded and sealed underground, never to be returned to the natural environment or cycled into new plants.