For Denise Buckley and David Quirke, opening Wholesome Kitchen at Dominick Street in Mullingar in 2019 was the realisation of a dream come true.

A dream come true not just because 15 years of thought and planning had finally come to fruition, but also because they had created a business that wasn’t just addressing the good health of their customers, but was also thinking of the health of the wider world as well.

Having eradicated plastic usage from their restaurant and switching to renewable energy, Wholesome Kitchen took an important next step in addressing their global impact at the height of the coronavirus pandemic last Summer, when they decided to plant trees in Africa and Ireland, to reduce and ultimately remove their business’s carbon footprint.

Following an energy use audit carried out by Self Help Africa, Denise and David decided to plant enough trees in the year ahead to ensure that Wholesome Kitchen is carbon neutral for years to come. ‘From the outset we’ve both had strong ethics when it comes to food quality and product sourcing, while we also use renewables and recycle everything that we possibly can. Planting trees is allowing us to remove our carbon footprint entirely.’  

At a cost of just €35 a month, Wholesome Kitchen could achieve their carbon neutral goal by planting 7 native Irish trees, and 70 African trees each month.  David and Denise wanted to go much further, and planted 10,000 trees in 2021!

'We’re looking forward to planting more trees, and on behalf of our staff, our friends and our customers are happy to be playing our part,” David says.

Wholesome Kitchen was a winner in the Emerging Business category at the Small Firms' Association's Business Awards 2021.

County Louth businessman Eamonn Victory is planting trees in rural Africa as a means of offsetting the carbon emissions that are generated by his retail shop.

 Eamonn Victory’s award-winning Centra in Dunleer is to plant trees in Ireland and Africa over the next two years, having teamed up with Self Help Africa to calculate the carbon footprint of his business.

“I started looking at the energy that my business was consuming, and loved the idea of being able to reduce or complete offset our carbon footprint” says Eamonn. “A little bit of research told me that planting trees was the most effective answer.”

Eamonn says that over the past decade they have made a huge amount of progress in reducing, recycling and sourcing sustainable energy for their company, but by planting trees he’s able to ‘go that extra mile’ and offset the greenhouse gases they produce by planting trees in Africa.

Based on energy bills and other information,  Eamonn is investing €50 a month to plant 10 native trees in Ireland and 100 in Africa per month.