Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones on the first official day of spring. Exciting times.

Also exciting is the new dog on the block. Woody is Charlottesville’s first “facility dog,” because while there’s been a K-9 police unit for a long time, there’s never before been a police lab that’s just here to spread good vibes. If you see him around the UVA medical campus or central grounds, expect your stress to melt at your feet in a small pool of dog drool.

Do one long thumb scroll for more Cville-specific updates like local events, cool houses, and pets to adopt.

🐶 Speaking of: Mavis! This wigglebutt loves to hang out right by your side, preferably leaning on you if it means more scratches (female mixed breed, 4 years old, 60 lbs).

It’s super cool to see more restaurants and grocery stores offering to-go cups, containers, cutlery, and bags that are compostable instead of straight-up plastic. That means instead of sitting in a landfill, these products can be turned into healthy, nutrient-rich soil over time.

Just look for the Biodegradable Products Institute logo on each item. If the certification’s there, Black Bear Composting can take it and transform it.

So if you live around Cville, Crozet, Waynesboro, Staunton, or Harrisonburg, do a little local good just by tossing a compostable bowl in your Black Bear bin.

Become a Black Bear member here.

Earlier this week, I met with the cofounders of Corner Juice for a Hot Bones interview. I was very excited for this chat because I’m a big fan of their hummus & avocado sandwich and Dank Sinatra smoothie. However, the only time we could meet was in the early morning before work, which presented a problem. I would have to skip my mission critical breakfast routine.

There are some people in this world blessed with the ability to wake up, get ready, and then fully function at work without once thinking about food. They may nibble on half a bagel in the office kitchen while telling you about their weekend, and they may pick at a sliver of doughnut during the all-hands, but beyond that they’re pretty much good to go until lunch.

That’s nice for them.

There are also people in this world who wake up and will simply perish if they don’t eat a full, fibrous breakfast immediately. I can’t overstress the urgency of this morning routine. It’s loaded with the same time-bound angst as a text from your significant other asking for a verification code. Breakfast in the next 10 minutes or all hope is lost.

Sometimes I’m not even hungry when I wake up, but still I must sit at the kitchen table for at least half an hour and eat my cereal, drink my coffee, and read all my newsletters. If you’re a three squares a day kind of person, you understand. Each spoonful creates a sense of worldly unity, a semblance of order before the chaos of the day, and a simple reminder that the greatest victory of all is not having to eat an old Nature Valley bar at 10am.

Anyway, the irony was not lost on me that I was interviewing the founders of a fabulous, all-natural breakfast, lunch, smoothie, and juice spot — and I would be hungry the whole time.

I’m not embarrassed to say I even considered ordering something to eat while I asked them questions (rude, but desperate times). But when I arrived, I learned this CJ location on the downtown mall was actually closed for the day to prioritize staffing at the namesake Corner Juice location closer to campus.

“The Corner is just bursting at the scenes. We just can’t figure out what’s happening.” That’s a nice problem for Joe Linzon to have. He’s one of the three Corner Juice founders, and he’s the one who met me at the door and ushered me to the single patio table set up on this off-day.

His cofounder and wife, Julie Nolet, was chatting with someone at the other end of the store before she came over to join us. They’re both tall, athletic people — bright eyed and enthusiastic, probably because they’d no doubt gotten up early enough to eat breakfast that morning. Their daughter, Claire, said hello with a mouthful of hazelnut spread and then passed out on her mother’s lap for the next 45 minutes.

The third cofounder is Joe’s brother-in-law, Kevin McConnell, who they convinced to move down from NYC to help expand Corner Juice early on from just juice to a full menu: “Kevin was very well versed in the sandwich world,” Julie said. Honestly, say no more. That’s the dream.

This is about the point when I started to forget about my hunger. Running a business is hard. Running a local business is super hard. Running a local restaurant is even harder, especially one that doesn’t go out of business within 6 months. So by that logic, running a local restaurant for nearly a decade is superb, so why not throw in the family dynamic (did I mention Joe and Julie were just friends when they started CJ?) to turn the plot dial to 10.

Add a New Yorker with strong food opinions and you’ve got a new Apple TV series.

As we chatted, what really stuck out to me was how nice it is to meet people building spaces like these in our community. Joe is from Toronto and Julie is from the Netherlands, and yet after going to UVA they both decided to devote themselves to making Cville a better, healthier, breakfast-friendly place.

Sure it feels a little woo-woo hand-wavy, but sometimes we need that.

“Corner Juice will always stay in Charlottesville, because Charlottesville is amazing,” Julie said. “We like to be in the store every day, talking to the community and connecting with them.”

For example, CJ gets its bread daily from MarieBette Bakery and Homestead Oven. Every morning, “we get that … whiff of France,” she said. “That’s why we are still here, because we want to be the ones walking [and making connections] … we do a lot of the deliveries [ourselves] for catering, especially with UVA professors and stuff like that — so we’ll be the ones walking up with the juices.”

“We want to keep that special connection that we have here,” she added.

“We’re trying to be the positive energy, that positive vibe place with good music,” Joe said. Customers can “trust the ingredients. They can trust the product.” (You can literally see your smoothie being made, for example.)

“Our whole thing is we want you to see what’s going into you. Food is medicine, and when you fuel yourself better, you will feel better. You’ll sleep better, you’ll live better. So we’re just trying to give people the tools they need to succeed,” he said.

I can confirm Joe’s statement, because after our early morning conversation, I pulled out my phone, placed a Corner Juice order for pickup at the other location, and was enjoying my normal cereal and this bonus breakfast within 20 minutes.

Plus coffee and a Dr. J, their signature cold-pressed orange, pineapple, lemon, and ginger juice. I’ve never had a more productive morning.

Before Joe cofounded Corner Juice, he and a few other UVA friends launched Roots Natural Kitchen, the highly popular bowl franchise that’s a cross between Sweetgreen and Chipotle.

The success of that venture didn’t so much illustrate that people wanted access to healthy, delicious, affordable food (we know that already) — instead it showed that local businesses (not just national chains) could meet this need and make money doing so. Roots is now available in nearly 20 locations on the east coast.

The disconnect between very health-focused communities and limited healthy food options also applied to Corner Juice. Joe explained that the positive feedback from Roots is what led him to jumpstart CJ in 2017: “Let’s try and give this community something that, as students, we really craved and wanted and just didn’t have.”

But while Roots is more of an in-and-out thing, Julie said, “our goal at Corner Juice wasn’t just to provide healthy food … it was also to create a space where people can hang out … especially with the square footage that we have on the UVA Corner. We have a nice sitting area. We call it the living room, because we wanted it to feel like home away from home.”

Joe mentioned the team runs by the acronym FADS (fast, accessible, delicious, and sustainable), and for a health-focused restaurant, the sustainability part kinda has to be crucial.

“The definition of sustainability to us is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” Joe said. “So we do a lot in order to try and accomplish that [including] using glass bottles for our juice, which we recycle … [and] we encourage people to bring them back to us.” (I’m also a big fan of washing them out at home and using them for homemade salad dressing containers later. The glass is thick!)

The team also uses compostable to-go containers, and Joe mentioned it was actually a long-time customer who set them up with their current vendor, Earth Cups.

But when it comes to juice pulp, they could use our help.

“We’re always looking to collaborate with anyone local who will take our amazing pulp, because it's such good pulp, [and] we don’t want to send it to a landfill,” Joe said.

When CJ first launched, they partnered with a local farm, which would pick up the pulp and give it to their pigs, but eventually they couldn’t keep up with the supply. A stint with Black Bear also proved tricky because of volume and pricing. So right now CJ sends a lot of pulp to Julie’s mom, who makes cookies out of it.

“We’re trying to get creative,” Julie said, and in addition to cookies they’re testing out dog treats from beet pulp. They’re also working with UVA’s sustainability group to find other uses.

“Just because it didn’t work out one way doesn’t mean that we're done with that idea,” she mentioned.

So if YOU have any ideas, send ’em through too.

These days, the cofounders are thinking about ways to take the formula they’ve created for CJ (healthy, sustainable, relatively affordable) and help foster that vibe elsewhere.

“Corner Juice will only have these two locations,” Joe told me, “but that’s not to say there can’t be another franchise of this business in a different city.”

“We have created systems and recipes in a way that there’s zero waste. So when you build a smoothie, there’s none left over. … and so things like that have made the operation not only very fast, but also efficient,” Julie said. That’s a model other restaurants could borrow.

And this is in addition to the behind-the-scenes forecasting models that Joe has built over the years. “We’re having to forecast demand in order to figure out production, because we’re cold-pressing everything on the Corner, and we do that in batches. So we’re using tons of historical data to inform our production in order to make as little waste as possible.”

Add to that other critical data like inventory sold last year, weather patterns, and even upcoming special events, and you’ll see that Joe has basically created the first-ever Bloomberg Terminal for cold-pressed juice.

Or in more holistic terms: “We want to set someone up for success — give them the tools and guidance and mentorship to make their own juice company,” he said.

I’ve been assured the two Corner Juice locations will stay where they are, but I’m very curious to see where the CJ model may go next.

Like many of you, I went to the Banff Film Fest a few weeks ago. Great movies, great stoke, great popcorn. The event is also a huge fundraiser for the Shenandoah National Park Trust. (Their raffle must have been singlehandedly funded by my wife’s optimism — we did not win).

I want to see if Hot Bones can try something similar to help raise money for the park. Here’s what I’m thinking. Let me know if you like the idea.

Typically, newsletters pay roughly between 1 and 2 dollars to get 1 new reader (not a bot) to subscribe. Most often, those ad dollars go directly to Meta or Google. But if current Hot Bones readers got their friends and family to sign up (thereby bypassing the social media ads), I could use that saved money to give directly to the Shenandoah National Park Trust instead.

Kinda like a referral setup, but instead of hats you get to support our local blue ridge park.

And if you’ve got additional thoughts, just reply to this email and lmk!

😁 Good news of the week: For some crazy reason, balcony solar panels are not legal anywhere in the US except for Utah. But! Virginia is about to be the second SunnyD state.

🪨 Rocks for jocks and walks for rocks: Learn from one of Virginia’s premier geologists on a guided tour around the Quarry Gardens at Schuyler. Saturday at 10am, $10/adult $5/kid.

🏠 Commuter cottage of the week: Whitewashed brick and picture-book tiny windows may make the commute from Richmond worth it, plus a screened-in back porch and writer’s shed (3 bed, 2 bath, $450k).

🏡 Cool rental of the week: 1920s Belmont farmhouse with original heart pine floors, a large fenced yard, and a showerhead that does not look stable (2 bed, 1 bath, $2,500/month).

🌻 I’ll trade you my carrot sticks for your Lunchable: The adult version of this is a seed swap, like the one happening on Saturday morning at Studio IX.

💼 Job of the week: UVA Sustainability is hiring for a Zero Waste Fellow and Sustainable Healthcare Fellow (1-year, full-time, $41,600 with UVA benefits).

💾 Remote job: Senior Director of Programs and Impact at One Earth ($125k - $150k).

Have an event or rec you’d like to share? Hiring? Interested in advertising? Share any and all info here.