spud! wins Better Business Bureau Green Torch Award

I am very excited to tell you that this past Thursday spud! received a Green Torch Award from the Better Business Bureau. This is the first time that the Bureau has given out such an award, and it is a timely addition to its three main awards for Marketplace Excellence, Advancing Marketplace Trust, and Consumer Leadership.

The Green Torch award covers both environmental and social performance and recognizes "an action, program or activity which promotes forward-thinking, sustainable business practice and/or involves a social purpose to contribute towards positive social change in the community." Given that there were seven other excellent finalists for this award, I was not at all sure that we would win and so it was very satisfying to hear our company name called out from the podium.

This award is extremely gratifying to me because it has been our company mission from day one to be the most eco-friendly grocery delivery service in North America. In fact, we have designed environmental performance into the very core of our business model. Here are a few examples:

- by delivering to people's homes on a set route once a week, we use far less fuel than an equivalent number of shoppers driving to their local grocery store and back.
- our warehouses use far less energy for the same amount of products sold than an average grocery store, which displays their products in open coolers, open freezers and under bright lights.
- because we buy more locally and more directly from our suppliers we generate 65% fewer food miles and 80% less food waste than an average grocery store.
- we use reusable delivery bins, thereby avoiding all those plastic bags at the checkout counter.

However, the true credit for this award goes to our talented and dedicated staff who have created an organizational culture around environmental and social performance. We fanatically recycle and compost, and use a variety of approaches to conserve energy and water. To help us continually improve our environmental performance, our carbon neutral team set a goal for us to reduce our carbon emissions by 10% between 2008 and 2009 as a percentage of total sales. While we fell slightly short of our goal by only reducing our emissions by 9%, I am nonetheless very proud of the carbon neutral team for encouraging our staff to do much better than we would have done without their ongoing encouragement.

This award is very timely because this Thursday evening we will launch a brand new Eco-Audit section on our website so our customers can see how much they save the environment with every spud! order. We believe the eco-audit results will show that for customers who order enough groceries with spud! to avoid a shopping trip, there is positively no greener way to buy their groceries.

We have timed the release of this new website feature to coincide with the worldwide day of action on climate change, this Saturday, promoted by the non-profit group 350.org. If you are curious why a group promoting climate change action would call itself 350, it is because 350 is considered the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the environment on a parts per million basis. Their goal is to encourage us all to take action to keep below this critical limit.

There are many events happening in each of our locations and we are participating in a number of them. Check our website home page to find out what is happening in your area. Thank you for the important role you are playing in our quest for a greener planet. Your environmental impact as a spud! customer is far greater than you think.

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