Spud Fan Blog

Last week, we held two major SPUD planning sessions, one in Seattle for our American staff and one in Vancouver for our Canadian staff.  Both sessions were two days long and both were a great success.

Last year we foolishly decided not to have a planning session because we wanted to save money during the recession.  I really regret that decision because what we gained from those sessions in terms of staff morale and great ideas,  far exceeded the costs to bring the staff together.

As I listened to the staff present their ideas on how we could improve our operations and the customer experience it occurred to me that we don’t need to hire external specialists to help grow our business.    Our staff already have the solutions; we just need to ask them the right questions and create a space for them to share them.

While we have strived to create a culture where the staff are encouraged to provide suggestions, the planning sessions revealed that we haven’t been doing a very good a job.   For a variety of reasons, their ideas simply weren’t getting through to the people who needed to act on them.

I have learned that this is the case in many organizations.  After the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986 a followup investigation revealed that the managers disregarded warnings from the engineers that there was a fatal flaw in the O-Ring design and failed to report them to their superiors.

What I learned from the planning sessions is that if you actively ask the staff for their ideas and listen deeply to their answers, you will get amazing results.  For example, one of our staff mentioned to our Information Systems manager, that there  were some browser compatability issues on our website for Mac Users.  As it turned out, she had tried several times to tell head office staff about the problem but she was simply told to “press F5 and it will fix the problem.”   My information systems manager could hardly believe that no one had told him about a problem that would potentially bother a bunch of customers, especially when it only took him a couple of hours to completely fix the problem once he had been informed about it.

When the staff we asked to list their top four ways that we could improve the customer experience, many of them talked about how our customers get annoyed with us when they believe that we have not properly refunded their freezer jacket deposits.  It was clear that this was creating enough dissatisfaction that we decided right then and there to stop charging deposits on freezer jackets and trust that our customers will return them.

On the first evening of both sessions,  the staff got together for dinner at a local restaurant and it thrilled me greatly to watch staff from different locations have a chance to talk casually together.

At the end of both sessions, the staff reported that the sessions were very worthwhile and I get the clear sense that they really meant it.  I know I found it immensely productive and have made a mental note to myself to organize many more opportunities for the staff to gather face to face and tackle our biggest challenges.

I am keen to begin implementing the many great ideas that came from the planning session and hopefully our customers will soon see the results in an improved customer experience.

I was at a party last week and someone made the alarming comment that over 50% of all our refined sugar intake comes from sugar-sweetened beverages, like sodas, “sports” drinks like Gatorade, sweetened fruit juices , and the sugar added to coffee and tea.   So I decided to do a sleuthing on beverage consumption trends

My first search took me to a medical website confirming my friend’s neat little party statistic and showing that per capita consumption of sugar-sweetened cereals is steadily rising and casusing growing health problems.  Between 1990 and 2000 across  America there were 130,000 new cases of diabetes. 14,000 new cases of coronary heart disease directly attributed to sugar drinks.  This in turn has resulted in an additional $350 million health care costs.

Some health experts, includng Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo of the University of California, San Francisco and Dr. Kelly Brownell at the Rudd Center for Food Policy at Yale University,  recommend adding a 1 cent per ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, which they predict would decrease consumption by about 10%, saving about $35 million in health care costs and improving health dramatically.

The American Heart Association recommends that we limit sugar-sweetened beverages to 450 calories or less per week (36 ounces), based on a daily 2000 calorie diet.  This means that we have a long way to go because our average refined sugar consumption is close to 400 calories per day!

High beverage consumption is particularly bad for increase levels of obesity.  I don’t know how they do some of these research studies but one of them apparently demonstrated that consumption of just one sugar drink each day caused a 15 pound weight gain over 5 years, all other factors being equal.

Sugar beverages are also a growing problem with children.  Recently the famous chef, Jamie Oliver, gave a talk on TED where he did a very impactful demonstration of the amount of sugar consumed by kids just by drinking chocolate milk in elementary school.  I won’t spoil it by telling you what the demonstration was, but I highly recommend that you watch it (click here and hang on until minute twelve).

Jamie Oliver decided to come to North America to start a food revolution, focused on teaching kids how to eat.  If you watch the video you will be shocked to see how little kids know about fruits and vegetables.  Our director of Purchasing, Darren, saw the video and proudly proclaimed that because his 3 year old son James unpacks their spud! bin each week, he knows his fruits and vegetables better than most adults.

In his talk, Jamie said that every food retailer needs to educate its customers on how to cook healthy, tasty seasonal meals.  This really resonated with me and I excitedly took this to our executive team to brainstorm how we could be this better at spud!.  While we provide healthy recipes in our Garlic Press, and on our website, we can do a lot more to make it easier for our customers to plan healthy meals for their families.  If you have any specific ideas on what we could do in this regard I’d love to hear from you.

Sarah as the Queen of Hearts, with her children, on their way to a local Alice in Wonderland Festival

A few months ago, we hired a wonderful new Senior Manager of Marketing, named Sarah Loewen.   Sarah has excellent credentials from a marketing perspective, including a Master’s in Marketing from Kingston University in London, followed by work at a major branding agency.   Amazingly, she also has direct experience in our business as she ran a healthy, prepared-food delivery service for new and busy families before joining spud!. What are the odds of finding a marketing expert who also has experience in home delivery?

However, what really confirms to me that she is a great fit for spud! is that she fully supports our commitment to environmental and social responsibility AND  truly “gets” our quirky, non-corporate culture.

This was brought home to me last week when she came in to my office and said that she would like to do something “completely different” for the weekly newsletter  this week.   She then explained that for Earth Day, she wanted to write a letter to our customers from Mother Earth as though it was a mother writing to her teenage children.

I told her I loved the idea so we bounced around a few ideas and then she went off to write it.  I was so impressed with what she came up with that I wanted to share it with you below.

I can’t wait to see what Sarah comes up with next to communicate our environmental and social values or promote our service!   Be forewarned, it’s going to get a lot zanier at spud! in the upcoming months with Sarah heading up our marketing efforts.  If you have any creative ideas on how we can promote spud! while exhibiting our quirky, “down-to-earth” personality, we’d love to hear them.

David Van Seters

Growing up, I was involved with many activities including a short lived Girl Guide career, my years in a girl’s choir, and my swim team where I got to go to the State finals (in Texas).  As I result, I often had different types of fundraising to do. And often, the things I was selling to raise money were various combinations of junk food. Chocolates, candies, salted things, some of which I ended up devouring, putting my allowance into sugaring myself up. On twitter the other day, I saw someone similarly lament: ”My house is filled with boxes of chocolate almonds & girl guide cookies to sell. Why does fundraising go hand-in-hand with junk food?”, which shows me that the same issue my mum and I were struggling with 15 years ago is still as present now.

So, what’s a solution? How do organizations with fundraising needs do it in a way that doesn’t put food with all sorts of multi-syllabic ingredients (look on those chocolate almonds, mine had all sorts of wild things in them) in the hands of school children? Well, we have a solution. At spud!, we’re proud to be launching our fundraising program, which marries all the great benefits of fresh, local, and organic food with supporting non-profit organizations and community groups.

One of our lovely e-flyers

Here’s how it works. We provide you with a unique code to share far and wide to whomever you would like. When those lovely people sign up for spud! service with that code, and place their first order, they earn $10 for your group. After their second order, $10 more and so on, with the fourth order they would earn $20 towards fundraising. And it really is that simple!

You give friends, neighbors, family members, friendly people on the bus a code for your organization, they sign up and start ordering, and you start meeting your fundraising goals. Each person who signs up has the potential of earning up to $50 towards your fundraising goal.

We’re also working to run a paperless campaign with you, so we’ll email you gorgeous flyers and posters with your unique code, that you can distribute through your contacts, all without printing a page!

Interested? Contact Danielle to get more information and get started!

Numbers broken down: Each person who starts ordering with spud! earns the following over their first 4 orders: $10, $10, $10, $20. Up to $50!

For those who know me well, hearing me talk about kale is not a new thing. Every Friday, spud! staff get a sampling of extra produce from the week, and I can often be seen bartering with my co-workers to get one more bunch of kale (I think my record is 5). I’ll trade any of the dairy products that might have made it into my box (things that are close to their expiration date or that we no longer sell) for my green and leafy obsession. I’ve even found blogs to follow of people who share my devotion to kale.

my garden, currently

But it wasn’t always this way. I didn’t become wholly smitten by this vegetable until 2006, when I lived on the Sunshine Farm in Chelan, WA. Kale was one of the veggies that most often had extras, or had some leaves that we couldn’t sell, and just like at spud!, Sunshine staff got to eat all the ’seconds’ that we couldn’t sell. And what really put me over the edge was a dish of massage kale from a local caterer and chef. It was a really basic recipe, just ribbons of raw kale, citrus and then a light dressing. And I was hooked. Massaging kale with citrus marinates it and breaks down some of the cell walls so that it gets all tender and delicious. I also like doing it with different vinegars, with my current favourite combination being ume plum vinegar with shredded nori, toasted sesame oil and sesame seeds for topping.

I’ve had kale stewed, braised, boiled, steamed, dehydrated into chips, used to wrap filling, mixed into soup, smoothies, and of course in salads. I have a preference between some of the different types of kale (dino kale for salads, curly kale for chips) and I do sometimes tend to get a bit preachy to my partner when he turns up his nose at the 3rd dish of kale for the week. And all of this obsession has led me to decide to grow my own this summer.

red wigglers joining my gardening team

Although I can say that I lived on a farm, but I didn’t have much to do with the actual growing and planting of the food. I just focused on selling everything my farming roommates grew. We did have a garden when I was little, living in Calgary, but with that too, I mostly munched all the peas off the plants, rather than having much to do with the plants actually being places in soil. So, for the first time ever, I started some kale seeds (and 8 other vegetables too) in my apartment last week. I’ve been out of town for much of the week, so I don’t actually know how things are going. Inspired both by David (see his posts from last year about starting an organic garden and how the season went) and by countless tweets and blog posts that have caught my eye about urban gardening, I’m venturing down the same path. I have a bin of red wiggler worms (thanks to City Farmer and the City of Vancouver) with the hopes of some great compost in a few weeks, some balcony boxes and pots, and a whole lot of excitement for my kale!

I’ll be sure to keep you updated as things start growing!

Are you planting anything this summer? What are you growing? What inspired you to start growing your own food? What tips do you have for the rest of the spud! community? Let us know!

Normally I won’t even look at fresh blueberries in the winter because I know they can’t be local.  However, this week I opened my spud! grocery bin and proudly unpacked a pint of fresh blueberries from Chile and traded “buying local” for “buying helpful”.

You see, for the past couple of weeks spud! has decided to help the earthquake relief efforts in Chile by selling organic, fair trade blueberries from a small cooperative blueberry grower called Green Tribe and sending 100% of the revenues back to the growers so they can use the money to rebuild the homes for their farmer workers and neighbours.

The idea for this campaign came from our distributor, Discovery Organics after they learned that the world’s fifth largest earthquake had hit Chile on February 27, 2010 (for more info on Discovery Organics, read our blog article from August 13, 2009).  Many villages were left without electricity, running water or food.

The Chilean farmers are using the funds to build emergency shelters, all the while trying to harvest what is left of their blueberries!  We are pleased to report that our customers purchased $3942 of blueberries, which has been donated. We’re thrilled to support such an amazing cooperative and community in Chile rebuild and continue doing the good work that they do for their community and the environment.

On average, spud! customers save 81 minutes a week by skipping the grocery store. We asked you to share what you spend your 81 extra minutes doing, and you responded in floods! In torrents! Over 200 of you sent in charming responses, sad responses, funny responses, video responses, and even pictures of leash-trained cats! We’ve selected some of our favourites to share with you (see them below!).

And congratulations to all our winners who have won a $100 spud! credit so they can keep on doing what they do with their time. Check out your Fresh News this week to see the winning entry for your city!

In No Particular Order:

1. Jenni B: “My extra 81 minutes a week are spent talking about SpudMan with my 7 and 3 year olds! Mama can I put the bin out? No, not today. When? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow Mama can I put the bin out? Yes. Will SpudMan bring pears? I think so. Will he bring gummies Mama gummies? Yes. Will he bring a funny pumpkin? Maybe. Will he bring some carrots with the trees on them? Probably. Yay! Is he here yet Mama? No not yet. Is the dog barking at SpudMan? No. Will he bring some disappearing icebergs? (dry ice bags) Not this week. DINGDONG Mama it’s SpudMan can I open the door? Yes. Oh, look it’s the new bin. THANK YOU SPUDMAN!!”
2. Erin – “I am a single mom of two that is always juggling an unending number of extra-curricular activities, on top of my full-time job AND university. Life is hectic! I should say I’d spend an extra 81 minutes scrubbing my floors, catching up on the piling mountains of laundry, or some other household task. Reality is I would come close to killing for a nap or a pedicure right about now!”
3. Jenny R – “With 81 extra minutes a week I would do what I always think I don’t have time for…reading those 3 books I bought on organic gardening, dust off the planters, seeds, tools and get outside and plant that veggie garden. I would really put into action all those articles, plans and ideas I’ve collected from books and pretty magazine pictures that make me feel greener for reading them but don’t really make me greener if I do not take action and make them happen in my daily life. Practical application a little every week makes progress towards my goal of living a healthy, responsible life and 81 minutes ought to be just about right to stop any nasty procrastination. Be Green, Don’t just THINK Green”
4. Kelley – I would spend more time with my strange leash-trained cat: taking her to the park when the sun shines.

   Credit K. Hevessey

5. Victoria – With my 81 minutes a week, I will take the time to go outside and look around at what nature as to offer and I will take the time to make somebody’s day better by helping out in which ever way I can.
6. Joel – How many extra spuds could I eat in 81 min? Well, my girlfriend’s the math nerd, so it’d probably take me my whole extra 81 min earned just to figure it out. Instead, see picture for estimated self portrait after eating spuds for 81 min.

   Photo Credit - zombielovin04

7. Mary – What would I do with an extra 81 minutes a week? Why, play with my miniature la Mancha goats! Now that Seattle has made them legal, my cuties live on my lot, and they are so much fun to hang out with–they love the attention, love to snuggle, and help make me a calmer, more attentive person (good for my husband, my children, and my students!) They currently produce wonderful fertilizer, and will also produce milk after they have kids of their own.
8. Jayme – With my 81 min, I do the most important thing in the world, play with my kids. Spud is a mom’s best friend!
9. Marina – with my extra 81 minutes I will practice antique Russian/Gypsy music with my band, Vragi Naroda! And we need to practice, believe me. We also need to eat the fruit and the cookies you deliver right before Wednesdays band meeting.
10. Jennifer – I hate, hate, hate! errands. I do as much as I can online and during my lunch break from work so that after work and on weekends I can play with my cats, watch movies, cook and even stare at the wall doing nothing. Those extra 81 minutes would probably be devoted to my quest to watching every single episode of The X-Files — I’m on season 5!
11. Jeanine – With my 81 extra minutes each week, I am finishing my PhD dissertation. I only leave the house to take my daughter to and from school, work towards my black belt in TaeKwonDo with my daughter, lead Girl Scout meetings, or sell Girl Scout cookies! I never have to shop anymore, especially because spud! carries almost anything I need! They have added items to their website each time I have made special requests. Another benefit of having spud! is that my cats can play in the empty boxes that sit patiently by the door waiting to be exchanged for another reusable box full of wonderful food for a very tired dissertation-writer and her family. (Can you tell I’m going a little crazy?) Anyway, yay spud!

Thanks so much for all our entrants! We’ve loved reading every single thing you’ve sent us! Keep letting us know what you do with your extra time each week, we just are thrilled to hear it!

After 12 years as an organic grocer, I have probably collected 100 different reasons to buy organically.  Well now I can add yet another reason with my recent discovery of the ”Blob.”   The Blob is actually a thick, dense layer of oxygen-starved water that sits – like a blob – on the bottom of the ocean, sucking the life out of everything that enters it.   It is like the lava lamps of the 1960’s, with their melted wax bouncing up and down in the water tube and constantly changing shape.

So what does the blob have to do with a food delivery business?  Well it turns out that the blob is the direct result of conventional farmers spraying their crops with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and phosphorus.    Over the past 60 years, the  dosage of chemcial fertilizers has increased 300%.   Here is a how a typical blob is formed:

The chemicals run off the farmland into nearby streams which eventually make their way all the way out to the ocean. There the plankton and bacteria take over.   The plankton go into a feeding frenzy from the elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorus and start reproducing like crazy.   They then die and sink to the ocean floor where the bacteria gobble them up and go on a decomposition rampage, using up all the available oxygen in the process.  (Please forgive me if I am getting too technical – it is a curse of my undergraduate degree in environmental biology).

Normally, the ocean currents would bring a fresh supply of oxygen and solve the probem.  However, the characteristics of the blob cause it to be resistant to mixing with the surrounding water, just like the lava lamp.

Image Credit NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

What is really scary about the blob is that there are now over 400 of them in the world’s oceans and they are getting bigger and bigger every year.  One of the largest in the world can be found every spring in the Gulf of Mexico, which receives all the agricultural runoff from the Mississippi river.   This blob is a whopping 6500 square miles, which is bigger than all of the Islands of Hawaii.

What is worse is that new, low oxygen zones are arising due to climate change and staying for months, leaving the entire area within the zone devoid of fish and causing a massive die off of crustaceans.  The one that is closest to us on the west coast is a low oxygen zone just off the northern edge of California, which first arose in 2001 and has returned every year since.

So when you get your next delivery of organic and local groceries, stop and pat yourself on the back for helping to stop the spread of the deadly blob.

If you want to learn more about the blob or about the health of our oceans in general, I highly recommend a new book called Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis.  It was written less than a year ago by Alanna Michell, who was recently named the best environmental reporter in the world by Reuters.   Just like Al Gore provided the wake up call on climate change, Alanna is sounding the alarm on the deteriorating health of our precious  oceans.

photo taken David Van Seters

The Vancouver 2010 winter Olympic Games formally ended last Sunday, but their legacy will last for a very long time.  After 17 days of intense competition both Canada and the US came out winners.  The Americans earned 37 medals at the games, which is more than they had ever earned before and more than any other country has ever won at an Olympic winter games.   The Canadians earned 26 medals, which was also their national best, and also earned 14 gold medals, more than any other country has ever won at an Olympic winter games.

As the leader of a company that has an almost equal number of Canadian and American staff, it is very gratifying to me that both countries did so well.  What I also find very gratifying is the evidence of ever deepening linkages between our two countries, which was expressed in many different ways at the games and which I experience almost daily within spud!

Take for example, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, who won Gold for Canada in ice dancing while Meryl Davis and Charlie White earned a silver medal.  Even though they could quite naturally consider each other arch rivals, they are actually great friends and even train together in the same arena in Michigan, with the same coaches!

Scott Moir said after their win, “We have such a special connection to Meryl and Charlie.   We knew they would be tough competitiors, that they were going to come here and lay it down. We wouldn’t be here without them.”  Only two months earlier at the ISU Grand Prix figure skating final,  Davis and White had earned gold while Virtue and Moir got the Silver.  You’d almost think they decided to take turns on who would get gold and who would get silver!

photo taken by David Van Seters

Another example is the Gold medal men’s hockey tournament between Canada and the United States.   Here you have players like Sidney Crosby representing Canada at the Olympics but playing for the Pittsburg Penguins at his day job.  Similarly, you have players like Ryan Keslar playing for Team USA, while playing professionally for the Vancouver Canucks.   Then to top it off you have, Zach Parise, who scored the monumental tieing goal with 25 seconds left on the clock, whose dad representated Canada at the Olympics in 1972.  One of my US staff commented to me that they were glad that the game was so close because it showed how closely the American and Canadian teams were matched.  I couldn’t have agreed more.  Both teams played magnificently.

As yet a third example, on the Monday following the closing ceremonies, the Vancouver Sun devoted the entire front page of the newspaper to share letters to the editor from Americans who congratulated Canada on a games, that started out a bit rough, but ended superbly.   It obviously matters a great deal to Canadians what Americans think of them that they would take up such valuable newspaper real estate to shares the views of their American visitors with their readers.

I frequently experience that close bond between America and Canada among our staff.   While our staff on either side of the border are focused on buying locally, packing locally, and delivering locally, they still generously share ideas between the locations to help each other provide the best service possible.  And when that isn’t enough, they will even travel across the border for the sake of the team.

I invited one of our American staff members, Seattle General Manager Henri Parren, to come up to Vancouver to experience the games with me and we had a great time even though we weren’t always rooting for the same team!   It was fun to stroll the streets of Vancouver and see all the different nationalities mingling together.  Together, we even found an exhibit showcasing green companies that included spud! .  Henri used the time to visit our Vancouver office and meet with the staff before heading back across the border for an important meeting of Washington State organic farmers.

photo by Henri Parren

I feel that our staff on both side of the border are enriched by their interaction with their cross-border colleagues.  It truly makes us a stronger company and creates a richer and more meaningful work experience for our staff and hopefully, you, our customers.  If you have thoughts on the Olympics and our collaboration and friendship between Canada and the US, we’d love to hear your views below!

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!

No spud! staff were harmed in the taking of this photo

Did you know that doing your grocery shopping with spud! saves you an average of 81 minutes per week?

The average family spends 90 minutes a week grocery shopping whereas the average spud! customer spends less than 9 minutes a week ordering their groceries through spud!.

Shopping with spud! means no driving or transit time, no parking, no checkout lines, no hassles.  That’s a huge time saving.  So what would you like to do with the time you save? Would you take up an exotic hobby, start a new form of exercise, spend time with someone special, or simply catch up on some luxurious sleep?

Tell us what you do with an extra 81 minutes a week and you could win $100 of free groceries from spud! Post your response below to be automatically entered into the draw. To get an extra entry, post a photo with your response. And to get two tasty extra entries, post a video.

Each spud! location is giving away $100 of spud! groceries, so make sure you tell us where you’re from.

Can’t wait to hear from you!

Contest closes: March 1st

In recognition of  Valentine’s Day, I thought I would pass along some advice about love that I found on the internet from a group of kids aged 4 to 8.   I think you’ll agree that they are wise beyond their years. “When my grandma got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toe nails anymore. [...]

  Last Saturday, spud! proudly sponsored a food event in support of a 79 year old farmer named Percy Schmeiser who has spent more than a decade fighting to protect his rights and the rights of all farmers to own their own seed.     Over 120 people attended the event and we were all eager to hear how one [...]