Pictured: Lisa, Daniel, friends and the Lupii Café team
Walking into Lupii Café was a welcoming experience when I dropped by to interview Daniel and Lisa Papania, the founders of the café and this week’s SFU profile.
After being greeted by the friendly staff members, I knew I had to try a bit of everything from their buffet. Rice, potato-vegetable stew, cauliflower stew and kale salad filled my dinner bowl. And for dessert, I had their amazing apple crumble and some fruit salad which had an abundance of different types of fruit in it. For anyone wondering, I was a big fan of the potato stew and the apple crumble– so good!!!
“But you won’t ever see the same meal twice at the Lupii buffet,” says Daniel Papania, my former BUS 345 instructor. “My wife Lisa sees what she has for the day and whips up an amazing meal based off of what we already have.”
“Sometimes I even get my students to do some of the cooking and meal preparations,” adds Lisa Papania, my former BUS 202 instructor. “It teaches them about sustainability and what we do here at Lupii.”
I was lucky enough to have a quick interview chat with Daniel during dinner, where he gave me insight about the café, sustainable businesses, community development and other fun facts and advice. Keep reading to see what he had to say about his family’s zero-waste and vegan café!
What inspired you to start Lupii Café?
We live in this neighbourhood, just across the street and we saw that there was a space that was opening up. It was an old video store that was kind of this hub for the community where everyone could get together. When it was closing, we thought “that’s really sad,” and we didn’t want it to turn into something that’s not a community space, you know– something that does not add to society. So we thought, “well, let’s not leave it to chance. Let’s go in there ourselves and put in something that we think helps the neighbourhood and the community.” But at the same time, my wife Lisa (she’s been working in the area of sustainability for over ten years now) said “look, I want to demonstrate to my students [at SFU] and demonstrate to the world how I think business should be run; so instead of preaching in a classroom, here I’m going to actually show what’s in my head and show how I think it should be done.” This café is a real-life example of the idea in her head. Pictured: Outside of Lupii Café
One of your staff members was telling me about you go and purchase fruits and vegetables from the market by yourself. So how is the café funded?
The short answer is that both Lisa and I teach at Simon Fraser University, so we have other jobs, and we use the money from the other jobs to pay for this. The longer answer is that we think that we need to put in a lot of investment up front like any business really should. And the only way a business really can work is by putting in lots and lots of investment up front, and then eventually after five or ten years, you’ll start to break even. That’s the correct long-term sustainable way, and really it’s the only way that any successful business has ever worked. If you look at Amazon and Facebook, they’ve been going for decades before they actually started to make any money. We’ve got a very long-term view, but the bottom line is that you have to give before you can take, and you have to earn trust, and you have to really be out there. So we do whatever we can, we have other jobs, we have other work, and we use that money to fund the programs that we do. We feel like it adds so much value to the community, and it’s our community too, so in the end, we all win.
Pictured: Lupii’s Saturday free produce program
What types of programs have you launched alongside the café? What do these programs aim to do?
We have tons and tons of programs that we are running here and have run since the three years we’ve been open. If I listed them all, we’d probably be here for days, so I’ll give you some ideas of what programs we do. One thing is that the theme of the programs we run is pretty consistent. We run programs that are community focused that help and support people in a lot of different ways. So some of the programs that we run are aimed at helping parents, such as single parents or parents with special needs children. We have homework help, which is run by the guy who used to run the video store, and we have meditation classes. All of these programs are free for anyone to come and join. We also have knitting clubs, we have clubs where people just get together and chat, and meet up with neighbours. All of these different programs are focused on being a place where people can come and talk to fellow human beings and other people in their neighbourhood. We now also have a lot of education programs, so we’re getting school field trips coming here, and we’ll talk to the children about sustainability and about zero waste, veganism, their diet and their impact on the planet. So it’s a lot of educational programs as well at the moment.
We also do catering as well for groups of 10 of more people through Ethical Catering by Lupii Café. We simply ask that there be no other non-vegan food at the event and that we bring our own reusable glass plates, cups and dishes. All of our food is vegan and sustainable.
Pictured: A Lupiibox, a weekly produce subscription program available at Lupii Cafe
That’s amazing! What response have you received from the community so far?
So it’s a very mixed response and what’s interesting is that at the very beginning, people looked at Lupii and thought “okay, there’s a café” and they came with all of their preconceived ideas about what a café is and what it should be. Some people just wanted to have another café in their neighbourhood where they could just get their latte and muffin to go, and that was all they wanted. So that’s what they expected. Some responses are that kind of response and other responses are “this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life” and “this is so cool” and “I’ve dreamt about this!” And other people email us from all far corners of the world asking “how can I start this in my neighbourhood?” So we have had the full spectrum of responses, and we have a small group of big fans, but at the end of the day we haven’t received any financial support, but that’s not why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because this has to be done. There has to be a space where the community can come together, and there has to be a space that can show as an example of how we think the world should be. It’s so rewarding when someone does come and say “that this is amazing and what I dream about and what we need in the world,” and this reinforces that we truly are reaching people.
I think it’s amazing too. So, do you have any future plans for Lupii Café?
Absolutely, there definitely will be changes happening at of the time. Even during the two to three years that we’ve been open, there have been so many changes. But what hasn’t changed is our strategy and focus, so how we deliver our strategy changes. At first, it was through a menu and traditional kind of café, and slowly we shifted to a buffet offering, and now we’ve shifted to more of these educational programs. The way we interact with people and the model will look very different, but the underlying theme and the message of what we’re doing are constant. So absolutely, we will change, and we cannot predict now what it will look like in six months or a year, but I can guarantee that it will be different to what it looks like today; although, it’s hard to say how. I can also guarantee that it still will be community-focused, zero-waste, and about sustainability, but it may be in a different format.
When is the café open for business?
We’re not a traditional café anymore; we’re a space, as I said, that is now running these programs. So we have a community dinner every Friday night, and this is probably the easiest way for people who want to come and eat some good food. You do need to book a space because there is only a limited number of seats, but it is free. If you go into our Facebook and you look at the events coming up, you’ll see if there is a future community dinner. That is the easiest way, but we are always available if someone wants to come and book this space for 10 or more people. We’ll make food for them, so if there is a group of 10 or more people who want to come and eat here, then they can contact us at zerowaste@lupiicafe.com or through Facebook and say “hey, I’d like to drop by” and then we’ll organize a time and then they’ve got the space available for them. We had a birthday party here a couple of days ago, so it is more by request. We found that there is no point in staying open when we didn’t get much regular traffic. We would stand here all day and would have only two people come in, so there was no point in doing that anymore. We figured there are other ways that we could better get out message out there than just being open all the time. In the three years that we’ve been open, we’ve never really got enough people coming to keep it open as a regular nine to five kind of thing.
Pictured: Part of a Lupiibox and inside of the café
What resources do you look to educate yourself on sustainability and sustainable business practices?
That’s a good question because so much of my day is dedicated to doing research, research and more research. So in order to have these conversations about sustainability with people, I have to know what I’m talking about, so that involves always reading the latest research about what science is saying about what we’re doing to the world, and what is the latest understanding about how food affects the planet and how we affect the planet. It’s basically making sure that I’m reading relevant and trustworthy news from real, reputable sources like Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate that tells us the latest understanding of what we should be eating. It’s always about making sure that we don’t look to “best practices” because I think that’s a bad word. Often “best practices” are more like old news. We don’t look to other businesses either because we are crazy ahead in terms of trying to push the envelope, so we are not trying to copy or mimic anyone; we’re trying to look at the science and research and try and put that forward instead and say “the food we deliver and provide here is based on science’s latest and best understanding of what is healthy for us.”
How do you manage your time between being professors, business owners and parents? Do you have any time management or productivity tips?
Yes, we have a lot going on, and yeah we are really busy, so it’s funny how when you’re really passionate about something, you don’t really notice how much time it takes because you’re just working on it all the time, from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. If you’re passionate about it, it doesn’t feel as much like a drudgery; it doesn’t feel awful. But if you’re doing something you hate, it will feel like that a lot of the time. But absolutely sometimes you will get less sleep, and other times you’ll work weekends, and then at other times, you’ll find that you have a bit of a break. There’s some flexibility, but it’s just all hard work, there are no real tips on how to make it easy.
That’s very honest, thank you! And thank you again for chatting with me today and for inviting me to eat at your café; it was an absolute pleasure trying the food and hearing your insight.