Chris Maykut is the founder and owner of Chaco Canyon Café, an environmentally conscious, organic café developed by the community, for the community with the goal to develop a more sustainably focused restaurant pertaining to like-minded customers.
The idea of Chaco Canyon began in 2003. Chris was tired of working in the restaurant industry. He had been a general manager in San Francisco at Millennium and he felt that he could do more. He wanted to get into the environmental field so he could give back to the world. After a morning at the University District farmers market, Chris and his future wife, Samantha stumbled upon a vacant space under Cedars restaurant. Samantha simply stated, “You should start a cafe there,” and Chris agreed. Six months later with lots of help, Chris and Samantha managed to get a small espresso and juice café up and running. His sister-in-law, Lois, felt the café needed something else: food.
She began bringing in what she had, whipped up some raw food to sell, and “behold, a market was born.” He says their company continued to grow from there, “not making much money and not losing much either.”
The community has been a vital asset to Chaco Canyon’s successes. “We try to really hone in on who we are and what we do best and who we can serve the best. That doesn’t necessarily mean reducing what we do but honing in on what we’re great at, what makes us excited to come to work and what makes our community excited to come here. [We’re] definitely a product of our community from the people… That’s why we’re here.”
He describes Chaco Canyon as sustainable, organic, gluten free, local, and slow food. Overall, he explains that being sustainable means to obsess about it and not compromise as much as possible. Sustainability factors into every decision they make, which makes things more complicated for them than it does for most other businesses. He goes on to say, “99% of businesses are looking at what’s going to cost [them] the least… we make every decision based on the planet, the people, and the community and we’re not making our decisions based on our sustainability as a business.”
He describes it as a balancing act where Chaco Canyon is finding themselves slipping into a more unsustainable business where they can only buy 90-95% organic foods because otherwise the general public wouldn’t be able to afford it. His goal this year for the company is to focus on turning Chaco Canyon back into a completely sustainable business and get more people in the door. He doesn’t “want to make things less great but get more people into the great things we do.”
One of the things they claim to be struggling with is letting the community in on what it means to be sustainable and organic, and he found that it means the same to people as Taco Time does. “They take your word for it but they don’t understand the complexities of it.” He tells us he knows he could’ve made the company more profitable in the beginning, but then he wouldn’t care about it, and if he doesn’t care about it, he couldn’t see the company surviving or rather, him surviving the company.
As the “head honcho,” as he calls himself, of Chaco Canyon Chris finds his schedule relatively flexible, which is important to him as he has a wife with a full time job and two children. He has about a 50 hour work-week where he spends six of these hours at each location (University District, Greenwood, and West Seattle) either meeting with people, staff, or supervisors. He then spends six to eight hours out on the road doing various tasks, and the rest of the time in the office doing the managerial work.
When asked what his long-term vision of Chaco Canyon encompasses, he responds, “I don’t really have much of an interest in going a whole lot bigger. My big mission, and it has been for a couple of years now, is to make this a sustainable business that can roll with the ups and downs of normal business cycles and be able to still do what we do.” They have pondered the idea of developing a fourth location but Chris is content with the work that they’re doing at the moment. However, if they did build, they’d build on the east side of Washington.
Towards the end of the interview, we asked if he had any advice for those of us looking to live more sustainable lives. “I think we’ve been told ever since I was kid that we live in an unsustainable planet and that we’ll have billions of people soon and that we’re screwed. Sometimes in the next hundred or two hundred years or even the next 10 years there will be a big war and we’ll all be blown up and we’ll all die. So it’s this really unmotivational story that we don’t have a sustainable planet. In fact it should be abundantly clear to everybody that, this planet and the technology that we can conceive of and we already have conceived of, can make this a sustainable planet…” He points out that many areas of the world that don’t have the “luxury” of choosing to be sustainable because their first focus is to survive, which is why “we have to be the leaders of sustainability because no one else is going to do it.”
The key to remaining sustainable, Chris says, is that it makes him, “really, really happy.” It’s all about choices. Chaco Canyon chose to never give away disposable utensils. In 12 years, they’ve saved 3-400,000 single utensils by making this little decision early on. “It’s cheap and easy to not live sustainably. It takes commitment, it takes getting uncomfortable, it takes money… Sustainability is a privilege,” he states.
Also thanks to the amazing Chaco Canyon Organic Cafe in University District for hosting our first ever pop up shop in December. We're so proud to be hosted by a company that is dedicated to feeding our community with organic, wholesome food based on sustainable supply chains. Check out their website or better yet, stop in for a delicious quinoa bowl and smoothie!
