Going for Green in the spud! Olympics

As you can imagine, Vancouver has completely caught the Olympic fever as host of the Vancouver 2010 games.  At spud! we have caught the Olympic spirit as well but instead of going for gold, silver or bronze, we are going for Green.  We want to show the world that there is no greener way to buy groceries than through a service like ours.

In previous blogs we have talked about how we help our customers protect the environment in the following ways:

• avoiding car trips (and associated fossil fuels);
• buying local (with our handy product distance info);
• buying organic (without the fossil fuel fertilizers);
• reducing food waste (through our just-in-time packing process);
• eliminating plastic bags at the checkout (with our reusable bins and boxes);
• eliminating grocery store paper flyers (with our online emails);
• reducing building energy usage (we have no open coolers or freezers and no bright display lights); and
• completely eliminating climate change impacts (through our customer supported purchase of carbon offsets).

Well, during the Olympics, we have gone even further by launching bicycle deliveries as a test pilot in some areas of Vancouver that have been affected by road closures.   This is something we used to do in the past when our grocery orders were much smaller but we are now considering bringing it back on some of our less hilly and more dense routes.

The customized bike cart in the picture can carry up to 400 pounds of groceries and about 20 bins.  While our current approach is to use a regular bike with souped-up brakes to pull the cart, we are looking into purchasing an electric bike to allow us to transport even bigger loads for longer distances.

We are working with an electric bike distributor to find a bike that has the power and battery life to allow us to complete deliveries almost as quickly (and with a much lower environmental impact) as our delivery vans.  If successful, we will look at buying bikes and carts for each of our locations.

We are also looking at switching from regular delivery vehicles to plug-in hybrids.  We were scheduled to be the first company in North America to test out a new plug-in hybrid from Mercedes but the test got cancelled during the recession and the melt down of the auto industry.

We are hoping that when the economy improves, we will be able to revive the test, which was to happen in Los Angeles, Portland, and Vancouver.  If we could deliver our groceries in electric delivery vans, we’d be a shoe-in for a delivery Olympics Green medal!