FreshDirect claims to support local farmers and small businesses, but is the company really as community-minded as it appears?

Throughout New York City, massive FreshDirect delivery trucks exhibit locavore-inspired branding that promotes small farmers and eating seasonal, with witty messaging and colorful images of fresh produce.

However, FreshDirect’s policies are far from community-friendly. In fact, its ubiquitous gas-guzzling diesel trucks are regularly singled out for disrupting the neighborhoods they serve with air and noise pollution. The company has also been accused of paying its non-unionized workers well below the minimum wage, clamping down on union organizers, and lobbying for hefty New York City subsidies. In recent months, FreshDirect’s planned relocation from Long Island City, Queens, to the South Bronx has ignited protest among residents and community organizers, who want FreshDirect’s “local” business far from its own locality.

The Good

FreshDirect’s success has come from its successful merging of e-commerce and grocery shopping. Launched in 2002, the company quickly developed a loyal following among busy New Yorkers who want fresh food but don’t have the time to buy it. The company tackled that problem by providing shoppers with an easy-to-use shopping platform that offers a wide variety of fresh produce and grocery items, with the promise that purchases will be home-delivered in a matter of days.

The company’s branding emphasizes freshness, local sourcing, and convenience.

We’ve hired New York’s food experts, built the perfect environment for food and found the shortest distance from farms, dairies and fisheries to your table. You’ll find all the irresistibly fresh food you could want, plus popular grocery brands for up to 20% less than supermarket prices… and we bring it all straight to your door.

According to its website, a key component of FreshDirect’s success is that it bypasses middlemen and sources products, specifically produce, directly from local farms, dairies, and fisheries. FreshDirect’s “Local Market” offers items sourced from within 300 miles of New York City, with an emphasis on small-scale producers and family-run businesses. It’s a veritable online farmer’s market, with heirloom tomatoes and eggplants from Latham Farms in North Fork, Long Island; free range Moulard duck breast from Hudson Valley Duck Farm in Ferndale, New York; and Milk Chocolate Smothered Pretzels from Asher’s Chocolates in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. FreshDirect also offers a wide range of organic and natural foods, at prices cheaper than or comparable to those at natural grocers.

The Bad

For a company that purports to support local farmers and small businesses, FreshDirect doesn’t seem to have much regard for the community in its own backyard. The company is regularly singled out for disrupting New York City neighborhoods with its massive delivery trucks, which often stay parked and running throughout the day. StreetsBlog claims that FreshDirect has “built a grocery empire on free street space,” pointing out that the trucks are essentially mobile warehouses and deliver “idling engines, double-parking, and gridlock galore” along with overpriced groceries.

The environmental impact of the idling vehicles is compounded by the fact that FreshDirect’s delivery fleet is comprised largely of vehicles with diesel engines, which belch pollutants into the air and create intense noise pollution. In 2009, then-attorney general Andrew Cuomo forced FreshDirect to pay a $50,000 fine for illegal idling and ordered the company to outfit trucks with shut-off systems that prevent idling for longer than is allowed by city law. However, these shut-off systems only affect the engine that powers the vehicle, not the separate motor that runs the refrigeration needed to keep the food fresh. As such, air and noise pollution continues to be a problem, despite a five-year-old FreshDirect promise to replace diesel engines with ones that run on biodiesels and find electrical sources for refrigeration units.

FreshDirect is also notorious for paying its workers wages that are well below the national average, in a city with a significantly higher cost of living than most. According to the New York Times, warehouse workers make about $20,000 per year, with less than two weeks of sick, personal, and vacation leave. Attempts to organize workers into unions have been swiftly silenced. What makes FreshDirect’s low wages even worse is that the company has long been supported by subsidies and tax breaks from New York’s Industrial Development Agency, with taxpayer support for the company exceeding $2.8 million in 2010.

In the past year, FreshDirect has encountered even more controversy with its South Bronx relocation plan. For a while, the company had considered a move to New Jersey, but city officials convinced it to remain by offering a hefty $127.8 million in tax subsidies and cash. In exchange, Fresh Direct has promised to create about 1,000 jobs over the next ten years, though the agreement is non-binding and only 30 percent of those jobs are being promised to Bronx residents. While the deal involved multiple political lobbyists, local residents and community organizers were largely exempted from the decision-making process. According to South Bronx Unite, an alliance of community organizations, the relocation will impose 2,000 daily vehicle trips through a part of the city that already faces asthma rates that are five times the national average. The organization has called for a FreshDirect boycott.

The Questionable

The locavore movement started out as a way to support small-scale farmers, businesses, and communities, as well as a way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Though FreshDirect makes generous use of locavore branding, its unethical practices and environmentally-unfriendly transportation methods are more destructive to communities than anything else.

After news of FreshDirect’s South Bronx relocation subsidies sparked extensive media criticism earlier this year, the company tried to abate some of its critics by expanding delivery service throughout the Bronx (previously, delivery service was limited to the borough’s wealthier neighborhoods). It has also announced that it will start accepting food stamps over the Internet for lower income residents. However, these moves are just a drop in the bucket for Bronx residents that are more concerned about how the relocation will affect the neighborhood, according to Gothamist. Before FreshDirect encourages its customers to “buy local,” it should first look at whether its own practices are in line with its branding.

SEE ALSO:

Behind the Label: Whole Foods’ 365 Everyday Value

Behind the Label: The Kashi Controversy

Behind the Label: McDonald’s See What We’re Made Of Campaign

Behind the Label: Chipotle, Food With Integrity

Check out all Behind the Label columns here.

Images: arvindgrover, Ed Yourdon

The post Behind The Label: Investigating FreshDirect’s Local Commitment appeared first on EcoSalon.

You peruse the stands, ogle over fresh berries, contemplate which goat cheese to buy, and smile contentedly as you walk away from the flurry of farmers and produce, full basket in hand. But is that local, organic, shopping induced feeling of happiness all a sham?

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that two large grocery store chains in the Northwest were faking their own farmers’ markets to draw in customers. Back in June, Safeway started posting “Farmers’ Market” signs above produce displays in front of their stores, only to receive a backlash from the local farming community which ultimately resulted in the store changing the signs to say “Outdoor Market.”

Over Labor Day Weekend, Albertsons did a similar thing, featuring their own “Farmers’ Market” signs next to their produce sections at over 200 stores. Has the term “farmers’ market” become the new greenwashing?

Although local farmers groups support chain stores selling local goods, farmers’ market are about more than just regional produce. True farmers’ markets provide the opportunity to buy freshly harvested goods directly from the hands that grew it – a far cry from regional apples that spent days in a truck and are sampled by a grocery store employee who has a hard time telling the difference between a Braeburn and a Fuji.

And it’s not just the Northwest. People are faking their farmers’ markets all over the country. In Los Angeles, NBC did an undercover investigation on local vendors and found that some of them were selling produce that the farmers hadn’t even grown themselves, in one vendor’s case, from Mexico.

It’s all a reminder that we can never take anything in the food industry for granted; talk to your farmer and know exactly where your food comes from.

Image: Natalie Maynor

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Lisa Foster, a former high school English teacher in Los Angeles, was living in Australia in 2005 (while her husband worked on a film), when she had a revelation at the check-out register.

Instead of asking the typical American grocery store phrase, “Paper or plastic?” the clerk asked, “Would you like a bag?”

Foster looked at the woman in line in front of her, carrying her own reusable grocery bag and the lady behind her, with an armful of them. She realized that she was supposed to say, “Oh, I have my own.”

She wondered to herself: what’s the deal with these bags?

She went home and did some research. Five years ago, no one brought their own bags to the grocery store, but the government did a public awareness campaign. Analogously, in 2002 in Ireland, the tourist trade was hurting because plastic bags were sarcastically known as the “new national flower.” The Irish government imposed a tax on every disposable bag. Politically, Australia could not impose a tax, but they did their own public awareness campaign which proved very effective. Foster recognized that the grocery stores had shifted their perspective: they’d still carry paper and plastic bags, but they would not offer them.

“Expectation is extraordinarily powerful,” she says. “Like looking at kids in the classroom to quiet down; expecting them to quiet with a stare is much more powerful than shouting at them.”

Before she returned to Los Angeles, Foster did further research. She always thought that paper bags were the way to go because they can be more easily recycled. But she found that it takes 50 percent more emissions of global warming gases to make paper bags than plastic bags, and 20 percent of all paper bags are recycled – the rest just end up in landfills.

Upon her return to Los Angeles in June of 2005, Foster told her friends, “We have to change this.” And a friend agreed that she had to do it.

She was even more motivated when she found out that eight to ten percent of the U.S. oil supply goes to making plastic bags.

“We will kill and die for petroleum, but once we make it into plastic, we just throw it away,” she says. So she contacted a Chinese factory where a reusable bag she had bought in Australia had been manufactured, and ordered 8,000 bags to be stored in her living room. She set up her own small business, 1bagatatime. She made calls to stores and potential buyers during her free period in the high school parking lot.

“I called stores and offered them the bags for 95 cents each, plus free shipping if they ordered before November 1.” She promised her husband she wouldn’t lose money – and she was hoping to get these mounds of bags out of her living room as soon as possible.

In March 2006, she left her teaching post (after eight years) to pursue her business venture.  Upon her leaving, the headmaster of the high school connected her with the chairman of the board at Ralph’s. By the end of 2006, she sold 200,000 bags to Ralph’s and Vitamin College.

Since she started, she has sold over 10 million bags. But as her business grows, she stays committed to her conscious intentions; by the third year of business – as the biggest buyer of the Chinese factory two hours outside of Shanghai – she demanded fair wages and made sure they did not higher children. When she recruited Verite to check on the factory, the wife of the factory owner who was also the bookkeeper, showed a book with scribbles and numbers. Since then, they have instated proper accounting techniques (pay slips), protective smocks, name tags, and a formal complaint system that has been mutually beneficial.

“The factory owners actually thanked me, because the migrant workforce has become more stable, and the workers don’t leave because they know they are getting a good deal.”

She says that bags purported to be made out of recycled material are not possible, since they would be poor quality and could not be dyed. However, she reasons that each bag she sells (still made out of plastic), require the resources of 11 plastic bags, but when consumers use and reuse them, they replace 1,000 bags. She says her bags appeal to U.S. consumers because of their trendy designs, colors, and thoughtful text.

Next month 1bagatatime will take part in the Portraits of Hope project in Santa Monica. For this project, blind and hospitalized children will paint art panels to mount on the Santa Monica beach lifeguard stations. 1bagatatime will use Portraits of Hope art on a messenger style bag and donate a percentage of proceeds.

Other than Foster’s success of launching a viable business catered to eco-friendly consciousness, what I find most compelling is that Foster’s personal career trajectory challenges the traditional linear thinking that the modern college-educated woman would do best to find her calling in her early 20’s and stick with it until retirement. Foster pursued her PhD in English literature for nine years, taught high school for eight years, and at a time when her daughters are out of the nest, she struck out on her own entrepreneurial venture. With 1bagatatime, Foster found a niche that became an outlet for her wisdom, independent thinking, and ethics.

The post One Bag at a Time: Lisa Foster Changes Grocery Store Expectations appeared first on EcoSalon.

True or false? Your local grocer employs a scheming team of experts who work behind the scenes to orchestrate every little detail in a devious effort to squeeze every cent they can out of you.

It’s true. Even your favorite organic food stores are guilty of this. So, how can you beat them at their own game? Here’s what you need to know:

Baked Goods – Not So Fresh

Although there are exceptions, most of what you find in the bakery sections at grocery stores was frozen when it arrived. Sure, the scene they set up can be quite convincing: employees in white chef hats working behind the counter with flour-coated hands. But, if you think you’re getting freshly baked goods, chances are you’re mistaken.

Manipulative Placement

The most expensive items and those that aren’t general diet staples are typically placed at eye level because they’re easier for you to reach. Before you insist that such an obvious ploy is an insult to your intelligence, it’s actually proven to be a pretty effective method.

Manipulative Placement, Jr.

This last tactic applies to children, as well. Foods that are marketed towards younger age groups are usually found on lower shelves, where kids can easily reach out and grab them.

Impulse Buys

An average of 60- 70% of purchases aren’t on a shopper’s original list, which are what the marketing department refers to as “impulse buys”. Staple items commonly line the perimeters of stores, guiding consumers through aisle upon aisle of goods they don’t need. That includes those displays set up strategically at the ends of aisles. There’s a good reason why manufacturers pay top dollar for this placement.

Clever Packaging

Instead of raising prices, many manufacturers reduce the weight of items but don’t change the packaging. In fact, the only difference you’ll notice is stamped in small print at the bottom.

Old Produce

Frozen fruits and vegetables usually contain more vitamins than what you find in the fresh produce section. Why? Flash-freezing preserves the nutrients they contain as well. Plus, they’re not as expensive. If you do buy produce, get it at farmers’ markets or high-volume grocery stores where there is rapid turnover of products. Smaller grocers that are less trafficked often have older produce, meat and dairy.

More Bulk = Less Cash

Remember when buying in bulk was a great way to save money? The sun has set on those good old days. In many cases, economy-size products actually cost more per unit. So, carry a calculator and do the math yourself. Your grocer isn’t the only one trying to dupe you. Manufacturers of the items you purchase have their hand in these decisions as well.

Food Safety

Food shopping can really work up an appetite, so, when you stroll by the salad bar, you may be tempted to indulge. If your stomach starts growling, keep in mind that these foods are kept out in the open at unsafe temperatures. And, that glass deli case doesn’t provide much more protection, so curb your cravings for pre-made tuna and tapioca pudding. Anybody want some salmonella or E. coli on the side? I didn’t think so.

Cheap Fillers

Sugar is added to a lot of products as filler simply because it’s cheap. If you think scanning the ingredients to see where it ranks is an accurate system, guess again. To trick consumers, the manufacturers use different types (sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup) to disguise this fact. So, even if the combination makes up a primary ingredient, they get bumped down on the list separately as a result.

The Fine Print

There are other ways manufacturers mislead consumers, and grocery stores are all too happy to let you be fooled. For example, if you’re looking for a product made with whole wheat, read the labels very carefully. The only guarantee is if it says “100% whole wheat”. If this phrase is preceded by the word “contains”, put it down and move on.

Store Brands

Are you wary of the quality of store brands? Don’t be. Many of the more expensive versions of these items are made by the same companies. All you’re paying for is the label.

Images: ralphbijker, jslander, lanuiop, RogueSun Media, jeffk, cheeseroc, mattieb, cbertel, Jacob Botter, danorth1, How can I recycle this, Lisa Brewster

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