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Delivering on the Promise of Sustainability

By Kathryn on April 8, 2012 in News and Announcements, Notes from the Field

So, we occasionally get people who say they don’t think a delivery service is very environmentally friendly. Our trucks driving around all day they think is very polluting.

These people have just not thought all the way through the comparison. Polluting compared to what? What we compare it to is each of our customers driving to the grocery store, in particular a natural food grocery store. This comparison leaves out some other neat facts about Greenling, but let’s start there. On average in Austin people live 3 miles from a grocery store. This includes all grocery stores. I would say that on average people live 4-5 miles from a Whole Foods/Central Market/Sun Harvest/Wheatsville Coop, if not more. That’s 8-10 miles round trip to go to the store.

Greenling trucks leave the warehouse with 60-80 baskets of food in them and drive about 100 miles to deliver all of them. That’s 1.25-1.66 miles per delivery. Taking an average of 70 customers, driving to and from the grocery store themselves, that’s 560-700 miles total, compared to our 100. So, just looking at the “last mile”, or grocery-store-to-the-table, we get your food there with up to 86% less fuel. Amazing! 86% less energy just in the last leg of the food’s trip. It’s a straight comparison because our vans, completely packed with boxes and with a refrigeration unit blasting STILL get gas mileage as good as the average CAR! over 20 MPG. And I’m guessing there’s more than average SUV and truck drivers in Austin, which get worse gas mileage. We get this kind of mileage because we use the most fuel efficient delivery vehicles available in the US, if you were wondering…it’s not common for a delivery company to say that. They were 30% more expensive than the competition, but we’re fairing the rising gas prices much better than our competition because of that choice AND to us it was an investment in the planet. It goes beyond the bottom-line…though we keep an eye on that too.

Now, considering we buy more than half of our food locally, that takes about another 1000 miles off the average product’s food-mile total. Did you know that often when you buy a locally produced product from the grocery store it is actually shipped from a local producer to a national distributor as far away as Colorado, California, or all the way to the East Coast and then shipped back to your grocery store?! I find it rather disgusting. And it’s true. Or, it’s produced on the East Coast and shipped to the West Coast for distribution before it’s shipped back here to the grocery stores. It’s a horrible symptom of scaling distribution up and using mega distribution centers instead of regional ones. Squeeze out some extra profit…or at least with cheap gas it squeezes out extra profit. With fuel prices climbing, regional distribution centers are becoming more competitive with the mega ones.

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Ice Ice Baby

By Kathryn on April 4, 2012 in News and Announcements

All the spring sunshine we’ve been getting means our bin packers are taking extra steps to keep your delivery cool! They’ll be including a reusable ice sheet in almost every order to ensure maximum freshness. This reusable cold pack sits in the bottom of your bin, beneath the shredded paper that helps insulate delicate items from the cold. (Unless you do some deep exploration of your bin, it’s likely that you won’t even notice it’s there.)

Please leave these ice sheets in your green bin. We clean and reuse them each week, so everyone’s groceries will stay fresh all spring and summer long!

Image via Snorgtees.com

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When Will Greenling Carry Texas Wines?

By Kathryn on March 16, 2012 in Ask Greenling, News and Announcements, Tips for Eating Sustainably

Texas Wines are not for Greenling. At least not yet.

This has been rather heart-wrenching, and we get quite a few inquiries about Texas wines. But here’s the bottom line – It’s hard to grow wine grapes in Texas. Really hard. So you can pretty much assume if someone is creating wine from Texas grapes they dumped lots of chemicals on those grapes to get them to grow. And I’m not talking a little liquid Nitrogen to give them that growth-spurt in the spring. I’m talking boatloads of all sorts of chemicals to ward off diseases, fungi, bugs, etc. You name it and it probably likes to feast on the oh-so-delicate Vitis vinifera grapevines struggling for survival in Texas climates.

It’s not pretty. So, what’s a self-respecting, Sustainability-oriented company to do? Well, we carry Sustainable wines not from Texas and will wait for intervention for the poor Texas grapes. I hear that Becker vineyards is working on some wine from imported, organically grown, grapes. At least that would be locally produced. And our good friend, Scott Collier, at Rockroom wines has some incredible wines that are just waiting on Texas Distribution.

It was an incredibly tough choice to leave these off the menu. The best way to achieve the advancements to get to Sustainable Texas wines is to encourage and support Texas wines. But we just can’t support anything that damages the environment. We hope you understand. And if you know of any environmentally responsible Texas wine operations, please let us know!

When we introduced the Parducci Sustainable Red and White, sales shot up above any other wine and I wondered if there was a misconception about our wines. Every single one of them can be called ‘Sustainable,’ though they may have different approaches to the term. Here’s the skinny on just a few of our wine choices -

Bonterra - These guys were one of the first to get Organic certification for their wines. They’re a great $15 bottle that supports people who are committed to the Organic seal.
Chimango - From Argentina, this is one of the lowest priced certified Organic wines combining the seal with affordability. Pick up the Cab or Malbec Rose for only $8.99
Joseph Drouhin - This winery has been cultivated by the same family for over 130 years. Using biodynamic farming (some call it ‘beyond Organic’) the Drouhin family uses only natural products with the utmost respect for the soil, the vine, and the environment. Learn more about them here -http://www.drouhin.com/en/index.php

And many more! Great wines you can feel good about buying and drinking. I’ll talk about our beer selection next time. Add beer & wine to your order here (As usual, I’m sorry to report that TABC only lets us deliver alcohol in Travis County) -http://www.greenling.com/categories/35/products

And a quick side note on the TABC – It’s actually quite incredible that we’re able to deliver wine and beer at all! We’re very happy to have worked with TABC to ensure we have the right security measures in place and the right kind of permit. It actually took 18 months to work through all of this. One of the rules we just couldn’t work around was that we can only deliver within the county where we’re located. So, there you have it. We’ve thought about having satellite locations in surrounding counties so that we can deliver all over….but we’ll only go through this long, arduous process again if sales of these items really pick up. So, to all who don’t live in Travis county, encourage all of your Travis-county-living friends to order so we can justify expanding this option.

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Have You Seen the Meatrix?

By Mason on March 10, 2012 in News and Announcements, Notes from the Field

My wife Mylie showed me this awesome video. I think it’s actually a pretty genius analogy and we both love the character Moopheus. Watch all 3 of them – it does a great job of summarizing the problems with factory farms.

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Brunching for Charity at the Sundown

By Aspen on March 1, 2012 in Greenling DFW, My Greenling, News and Announcements

This Sunday, March 4, from 10:30am to 2pm, we hope you’ll come out for a delicious brunch at the Sundown at the Granada in Dallas. Featuring local ingredients donated by Greenling, proceeds from ticket sales will benefit the Promise of Peace community garden, which supports the East Dallas community by hosting events and camps for children and families to learn the wonders of growing vegetables and flowers. As their website states, the garden is a place where dreams are grown and participants develop a strong sense of belonging.

Sharing the love at Promise of Peace community garden

You won’t want to miss this brunch – led by Chef Patrick Stark, a team of local chefs have designed a tantalizing 5-course menu, including specialty cocktails, to be served in the cozy and fun atmosphere at the newly opened Sundown at the Granada. The menu is locally focused and will feature ingredients donated by Greenling, sourced directly from our local farmer heroes.