By Dina Novarr—
April is Earth Month, which means it’s the one time of year when sustainability stops being background noise and becomes the entire conversation. So, consider this my contribution: an ode to the businesses quietly doing the work year-round, and the certification program that holds them to it.
Mission Rock Resort is one of those businesses. It operates as a two-story waterfront destination for up to 450 guests, alongside the casual ground-floor Rock Café, and is known for pristinely sourced seafood, oysters, and a waterfront happy hour that’s earned a devoted following.
When I visited this month, I ordered the Garden Party mocktail, a name that felt almost too on-theme for a piece about Earth Month. If a mocktail is going to serve as the origin story for an article about sustainability, it couldn’t have a better name. Sitting on the sunny, fog-defying shores of Mission Bay at Mission Rock Resort sipping something herbal, bright, and deeply optimistic, I knew this place was doing something right. It was not just the mocktail, but the whole operation.
Turns out, Mission Rock Resort is one of the largest restaurants certified by the San Francisco Green Business Program, a designation that, if you haven’t been paying attention, is a bigger deal than a lot of people realize.
The San Francisco Green Business Program isn’t a sticker you buy at a farmers’ market. It’s a rigorous, city-backed certification administered through the California Green Business Network, a statewide coalition that holds businesses to consistent, verified environmental standards. In San Francisco, it’s a three-agency collaboration between SF Environment, the SF Department of Public Health, and the SF Public Utilities Commission.
To earn the designation, a business must demonstrate compliance across five pillars: waste reduction, water conservation, pollution prevention, sustainable transportation, and energy conservation. Auditors show up. They verify. And the recognition only lasts four years, meaning there’s no coasting on a decade-old plaque.
Since the SF Environment Department launched the program in 2004, over 900 businesses citywide have been certified. In the most recent major cycle from July 2022 through March 2024, 147 certifications
were awarded, one of the largest single-cycle counts in the program’s 20-year history. In 2023 alone, certified Green Businesses collectively saved over one million gallons of water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 264,000 pounds, equivalent to the carbon sequestered by roughly 140 acres of forest in a single year.
That’s the aggregate power of individual businesses deciding to do the harder, smarter thing. Not all of those businesses are corporate towers. Some of them are places where you go on a Tuesday afternoon to eat oysters and watch the bay. A restaurant of Mission Rock’s size carrying a Green Business certification is meaningful at scale. The water, energy, and waste practices that certification requires, applied to an operation serving hundreds of guests daily, compound into real environmental impact. That’s math worth doing.
Consumer behavior moves the market. Choosing certified Green Businesses for dinner, for events, for anything, creates a direct financial incentive for more businesses to pursue certification. It closes a loop. For business owners, the process is designed to be accessible, built specifically for small and medium-sized businesses. The SF Green Business staff provide technical guidance, site consultations, and connections to rebates and incentive programs. The average timeline is three to four months.
The SF Green Business Directory lives at https://greenbusinessca.org/
The website is searchable by location and sector, and takes about thirty seconds to check before your next reservation or event booking. This Earth Month, it’s worth the time.
I started with a mocktail, but I want to end with a boozy version of it, because, if a drink called the Garden Party can sit at the confluence of sustainability and a sun-drenched afternoon in Mission Bay, it deserves to be sent off with a little spirit. It’s the kind of drink that makes you slow down, look at the bay, and appreciate what “doing it right” actually looks like in practice.
For this cocktail, I am featuring La Gritona Reposado, which is led by Melie Cardona and an all-women team out of Jalisco’s highlands. This additive-free tequila ages in recycled American whiskey barrels, ships in 100% recycled green glass, and keeps its production footprint lean without making a spectacle of it. It is clean, considered, and made without compromise.
Mission Green Spritz
1.5 oz La Gritona Tequila Blanco
0.75 oz fresh lime juice
0.25 oz St Elder Elderflower Liqueur
0.25–0.5 oz agave syrup (adjust based on desired dryness)
2 cucumber slices
3 mint leaves
2 small basil leaves
2–3 oz prosecco (Bortolomiol Prior Brut, which represents the heartbeat for this month)
2 drops saline solution (4:1 water to salt)
Add cucumber, mint, and basil to shaker and gently muddle. (Use organic or organically-grown produce and more whenever possible. In this case, I picked these ingredients from plants on my San Francisco Patio.) Add tequila, lime, elderflower, agave, and saline solution. Shake lightly (quick, bright shake). Fine strain into
a wine glass over fresh ice. Top with prosecco and gently, yet quickly, stir.
To find certified Green Businesses near you, visit https://greenbusinessca.org/
To learn more about certification, visit https://bit.ly/4cBNjpp
San Francisco-based Dina Novarr enjoys sharing her passion for fine wines, spirits, non-alcoholic craft beverages, and more with others.
Cocktails With Dina by Dina Novarr
Published on April 23, 2026
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