Making Sustainability Delicious in Glacier Park

Think of Glacier National Park, with its million-acre range of wild and raw topography, and imagine it as a stage: millions of people flowing in and out, mostly in a three-month time span, looking, hiking, exploring, camping, and, inevitably, eating and drinking.

For Chef James Chapman, the executive chef for Xanterra Parks and Resorts, summer in Glacier Park is when the restaurants within the park’s boundaries feature his menus and his staff for about 350,000 visitors.

Feeding hundreds of thousands of people in 90 to 120 days is challenge enough, but Xanterra has added to its own challenge through the practice of seeking more sustainable options for nearly everything on the menu.

“We’re pretty proud of our company,” Chapman said.

When Xanterra took over as the concessionaire for the park in 2014, Chapman, along with Food and Beverage Director Jeremiah Hook, made a push for not only for sustainable products, but local food and drinks as well.

“We’re able to get into the 60 percent-range of our spirit sales being sustainable,” Hook said.

Not only does selling local products help buoy the surrounding economy, Hook said, but they’ve also found that local sells. When it came to whiskey sales last year, Glacier’s restaurants and lounges sold about 170 bottles worth of the big, national brands, compared to 490 bottles in local booze.

The company spent $1 million in sustainable purchases in 2015, with $675,000 of that in local food and beverage purchases. Fifty-nine percent of the food purchases were sustainable, along with 92.1 percent of the beverages.

Local food suppliers include the Western Montana Grower’s Co-op, Birch Creek Colony, Montana Coffee Traders, Flathead Lake Cheese, Life Line Farm, Cream of the West, and many more.

If a producer can’t be found in the Flathead, Chapman and Hook first search the state. For example, they started using Tumblewood Teas, based in Big Timber, and now the tea company has doubled its staff by adding two full-time jobs to keep up with the demand.

Flathead Lake Brewing Company created Lone Walker Ale specifically for the Glacier lodges, and it became the third-highest selling beer in the park last year.

Chapman said he found Wagyu beef through KMC Ranches, in Whitefish and Columbia Falls, and purchased one head of beef last year, but increased the order to three heads, and this year, the menu will feature the KMC Ranch label.

“We feel Glacier National Park is a stage, and is an opportunity to showcase these products,” Hook said.

And once a local, sustainable product hits the menu, it’s likely going to stay there, instead of changing up the menu each year and shuffling local products out.

“When we’ve got a good product that’s local and sustainable, we’re going to stick with it,” Chapman said.

Most of the restaurants run by Xanterra are members of the Western Sustainability Exchange, which is dedicated to local sourcing, and Hook and Chapman said their doors are open for more local vendors to pitch their products.

This year, one of the major changes will be using meat and seafood that is delivered fresh, never frozen. Xanterra is also refurbishing and rebranding the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn’s restaurant to ‘Nell’s, as a tribute to George Bird Grinnell. It will serve classic fare like Reuben sandwiches, but the beef will be grass-fed from Montana, the sauerkraut will be from nearby Hutterite colonies, and the bread will be local.

Hook also took some of the old pine boards removed during the Village Inn refurbishment project and made them into the new menu boards for Swiss and Lucke’s lounges. Xanterra also recycles glass, using 70,000 pounds of it in the new transportation and engineering building housing the park’s buses.

Maintaining a focus on sustainability on such a large level presents challenges, Hook said, but the company believes it is worth it. And both men said their work so far is merely the beginning.

“We’ve got 13 years in our contract left,” Chapman said. “Who knows where this is going to grow?”