Life

Just Salad Is Releasing An "Unlimited Salad Bowl" That Will Only Cost $99 For The Whole Month

Everything is better when it's unlimited. I just got unlimited data on my phone, and now I can listen to the Side Show original Broadway cast recording wherever I go, even though I cannot find the album on Spotify anywhere. YouTube, on the other hand, is a true gift. But the best kind of unlimited option is food, obviously, because food is always good in absurd quantities. Now, a popular salad chain's got you covered: Just Salad has released an "Unlimited Salad Bowl", and it promises to change how you lunch.

Indeed, according to their website, Just Salad's new Unlimited Salad Bowl promotion launched on Monday, April 16. It sounds like a pretty good deal: for $99, you get a reusable salad bowl and a punch card that you can bring in to any Just Salad location from May 1 to May 31. In exchange, you get one chef-designed salad or one Build-Your-Own salad with one protein each day. If you go every day, that evens out to about $3.19 per salad, which is a pretty affordable lunch, even if you tend to make your own every day.

There are some caveats: the deal excludes sandwiches, wraps, and other non-salad items, so you have to commit to eating a salad every day. You can only get one salad per day, so it's not really unlimited, so much as you get a total of 31 salads. And the advertised $99 doesn't include the $9.99 shipping cost for the bowl, so really you're paying about $3.50 per salad, though that's still a deal, considering Just Salad's offerings tend to clock in around $10.

In totality, the discount salad deal is a good one, but my favorite thing about it is that it encourages purchasers to reuse plastic. According to National Geographic, mass plastic has created about 8.3 billion metric tons of waste in the last 60 years, and almost none of it gets recycled. Since it takes nearly half a century for plastic to degrade, the waste ends up clogging the environment and wreaking havoc on marine and land animals who have to suffer from our destruction. Animals occasionally eat plastic that ends up in the ocean, mistaking it for food. Plastic gets stuck in their noses and beaks, ultimately choking and killing them.

So while this $99 salad deal sounds like a good way for folks to get hooked on Just Salad's lunch options, it's also a way to get people to stop clogging up landfills and oceans with plastic takeout containers. Just Salad says you can keep your reusable bowl even after the promotion runs out at the end of May, and people who do will have access to standard reusable bowl benefits, like two free essentials or 1 free cheese or premium addition to their salads in the future. So far, Just Salad says their reusable bowls have spared the planet over 75,000 pounds of plastic waste, and every little bit counts.

Of course, the ecological benefits are just the icing on top of the cake. There are a bunch of Just Salad locations near me (they're all over New York City, in fact), and they've got pretty good stuff, even though I harbor a deep-seated hatred of vegetables (I still try to eat them so I don't get scurvy, but it's hard). I'm a particularly big fan of the Modern Greek Crunch, which comes with romaine, feta, pita chips, lentils, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, pickled red onions, and a spicy tahini sauce, but the other menu items look equally delectable. If you're going to be stuck eating the same thing every single day for a month, it might as well be a crafted salad, and plain bread and turkey, which is what I make for lunch every day.