I would also suggest dropping The FruitGuys and Green LA Girl a line, I’m pretty sure they will help you out way more than I can.

My freak-out has to do with packaging and I’m hopefull la-green girl (or anyone) can help. You guy’s know I’m a coffee roaster and that’s cool, but there is ever increasing pressure to package catering to the non-green , “wow-check this out crowd”. Boxed, plastic wrapped, full of origin notes, grower profiles, ect., you know the deal! Lot’s O paper!

How can I make my product “seem” to have added value while at the same time minimizing the effect I personaly have on the environment? Where do I find eco friendly packaging stuff?

Thanks and I still think there are way to many feral thingy’s a’runnin around!

I think I’m lucky in that, in LA, we have lots of organic fruit and veggie delivery options — but that is certainly not true of many many cities and towns in the US — which I think is where you fruit guys will really serve as innovators and forward-thinkers

Are the fruits organic? — We started the business in 1998 delivering organic produce and we still do. For those who want our organic mix it’s one of the crates customers can choose from. We are not exclusively organic and have added a conventional line as we have grown. We did this because I thought it was best to first get people interested in eating produce at work(rather than junk food) as a priority. Since the company pays for our service some organizations are more price sensitive than others and organics tend to be more expensive. Still, we try to include as many organic fruits as we can into the conventional mixes based on seasonality and cost. It’s nice to introduce people to some of the smaller and organic farmers we work with. There are also some small heirloom farms that we like to buy from that aren’t necessarily organic but have a varietal preservation focus. I like to work with these folks too because it helps keep some of the non-commerical fruit varieties in the public experience.

What delivery system or service does the company use? — We deliver in the SF Bay Area in both FruitGuys trucks and through local delivery companies. We also deliver through other companies around the state and country (we ship through FedEX, UPS and some regional carriers). I recognize the challenge that distribution poses in terms of environmental impact and have concerns about it. We’ve been shipping fruit to the east coast and are going to be opening a business out there in order to move forward on regionalized and local buying so that transportation impact is lessened. This however is one of those things that takes a bit of time to implement.

Is there a way to just reuse the boxes — In the Bay Area we can pick up our boxes with the next delivery. We have also tried to design them so that they can have multiple uses. The interior width of the box was consciously chosen to fit letter-sized file folders and many companies use our crates for storage this way. We are also constantly trying to better the percentage of post-consumer cardboard while reducing the amount needed through innovations to our box. I think I mentioned that we will be able to reduce the cardboard we use when we get a new piece of equipment up in February that will use vegetable based glue (food grade, non-toxic, water soluable, compostable)to add strength to the crate and reduce our cardboard need. Plus I think I’ve found a supplier that can up our post consumer count by another 10-15% this year (we’ll keep moving toward 100% but the weight of our produce requires certain strength characteristics). We always ask customers to recycle our crates as well.

I hope this answers your questions. Please feel free to email me if you have others. We are also very concerned about social justice issues around food security in low income areas and have been working on a project in the Bay View Hunters Point around this. You can read an article that was in the SF Chronicle about what we’ve done at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/28/MNGD7M1UNH1.DTL

or you can check out a neat multimedia piece that students at sf state did on the program (just click the yellow “launch multi media tab” on the right: http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/tech/007780.html

Take care,
Chris Mittelstaedt

I don’t expect you to have answers to all of these Qs — I’m just remarking on the thoughts that your post brought up for me All in all, I think the farm direct program’s an interesting one, but I’m having a bit of a difficult time figuring out what makes The FruitGuys different from the other produce delivery peeps — other than that they ship nationwide… Regardless, I’m happy to see more green companies sprouting up and thriving