A Vegan Restaurant in LA is Helping Bees And Butterflies By Giving Away Free Plants to Customers

Somewhere in the middle of a strip mall in Culver City, Los Angeles, stands a towering cream-colored building. Peeking through its glass windows, one will see happy faces lit up in the delicious satisfaction of discovering their inner shine. The building is not a meditation center. It’s Hey, Sunshine Kitchen, a vegan restaurant where customers don’t just dine, they also shine.

Every Monday, the owners, Heather Golden Ray and Jenny Engel, set up yellow waist-high racks in front of the restaurant and stock these with fresh pots of wildflowers, sage, California poppies, oaks, and assorted plants. For each classic cheeseburger, spicy tacos, or other orders their customers make, they hand out a plant to them to take home. This isn’t just a random gesture of generosity. The goal is to restore the pollinator population. The two sister CEOs are on an inspiring mission to revive the inner shine, both of humans and of the planet Earth, as they said in an interview with LAist.

“Would you like a plant?” Golden Ray asked a customer named Matt Diamond as he walked out of the restaurant's lunchroom with a take-out bag of vegan chicken Caesar salad and carnitas bowl. He became excited because he had just started a garden, and his girlfriend was going to love the California fuchsia he had picked up from the yellow rack. He told the LAist reporter that this small gesture made him feel less helpless about the gigantic issue of climate change. “Because when you read the news, a lot of times you think there's nothing we can do, and we're just in trouble. So I love seeing things like this and helping out wherever we can,” he said.

Golden Ray revealed that they have partnered with South Bay Parkland Conservancy to help pollinators like butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, and bees thrive. Every #pollinatormonday, when a customer eats something from their plant-based menu, they gift them these plant pots for free, so they would help restore the declining population of pollinating insects. “This is our pollinator program... that we created in order to bring back the habitat of bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, and other pollinators,” Golden Ray explained to the outlet.

Thanks to their remarkable initiative, the fertilizing pollen that helps propagate plants and flowers is now probably scattered throughout Los Angeles. Over the past two years, they have gifted thousands of plants to the restaurant customers. Although the plants are handed out only on Mondays, the program continues to roll through all seven days of the week. On the remaining days, the cash register at the restaurant is lined up with baskets slung with brown packets of pollinator plant seeds. Customers can take home these packets and help plants and pollen thrive.

Seeing the explosive response their program received, the CEO’s said they are very likely to expand it outside Culver City. Their mission, Golden Ray said, is not just pocketing a pretty penny, but to bring a real, transformative shine into the world. “We're teaching kindness and compassion through what we're doing. We're trying to nurture people's health, so this is an all-encompassing company. We're not just in this to make some cash, because I don't think we would open a restaurant if we wanted to do that.” In a nutshell, this is a sign for you. It’s raining free plants and inner shine. Go grab a sandwich!