Small Business

Dennis Salazar: the complete package

April 3, 2011

Dennis and Lenora Salazar

Back in 2007, Dennis Salazar and his wife, Lenora, took a leap.

With about a half a century of combined experience in the packaging industry, they decided to start their own company.

And to make it as “green” as possible.

Then Dennis did something smart. He wrote about his plans. He didn’t write a white paper. “They’re long, they’re boring, they take a lot of time and nobody reads them,” he says. Instead he started a blog, which is no easy feat for someone who’s technical skills aren’t top-of-the-class. “I’m not a young techie,” he told me, unnecessarily, as we struggled to connect via Skype.

He called his first blogpost “Am I retrainable for sustainable?” and wrote:

OK, I admit it. I am confused and perhaps even a tad nervous.

After more than 30 years as a packaging professional focused on flexible—dare I say—plastic packaging, this new movement people are calling ” sustainable” packaging has me seriously concerned.

He obviously didn’t have all the answers, but he promised to try to figure out what’s best for his customers and for the environment.  He listed Seven R’s — renew, reuse, recycle, remove, reduce, revenue and read, promising to education himself, his customers and ordinary consumers as he learned more. “That’s the beauty of this market,” he says. “While we teach on a daily basis, we learn on a daily basis.”

Today, Salazar Packaging is doing well. Based in Plainfield, IL, the firm has customers from all around the U.S. including well-known national brands like Stonyfield Farms and Method and smaller firms like Coyuchi, which makes bath, bedding and baby products from organic cotton, and Volcano Island Honey Co, which makes Hawaiian white organic honey.

I ordinarily don’t write about small b-to-b companies–my focus is the FORTUNE 500, and consumer brands–but Dennis, who is now 56, has a story is worth telling, for several reasons. [click to continue…]

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Justin’s Nut Butter: a squeeze play!

March 15, 2011

Little things matter.

Like squeeze packs.

I’ve surely tossed away hundreds, maybe thousands, of the little silvery plastic packs of ketchup, Gu and Power Bar gels, but I’d never thought much about the environmental impact of squeeze packs.

Then I was introduced to Justin Gold, the founder and CEO of Justin’s Nut Butter, a small but fast-growing company that sells gourmet, organic peanut, almond and hazelnut butters in 1.15 ounce on-the-go squeeze packs that retail for $0.69 to $0.99. These packs were great for business at the Boulder, Colorado-based company, which now gets about 80% of its revenues from single servings. But squeeze packs are a blight, albeit a small one, on the environment because they are made out of several layers of different materials that are welded together and can’t be recycled or composted.

Most small-company CEOs  would have shrugged their shoulders at this problem and moved on. Not Justin. [click to continue…]

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Randall Davidson’s 20 green tips for small biz

January 24, 2011

Today’s guest post comes from Randall Davidson, who is the lead project manager at Audio Transcription, an eco-friendly transcription service based in San Francisco. Clients send audio files to the company, which are parsed into smaller clips, digitally distributed to a network of trained transcribers and returned as a complete, quality-assured transcript. In addition, the company offers online transcription services, which are the greenest form of transcription available because no CDs or flash drives need to be shipped through the mail. Randall, who is 28, has introduced a number of the green practices outlined below into Audio Transcription’s marketing operations.

Small businesses employ more than 52% of working Americans, according to the Small Business Administration, and comparable percentages in other developed countries. It follows that small businesses generate a substantial portion of the business world’s environmentally harmful waste. To help small business owners and employees minimize their environmental impact, here are 20 simple ways to more sustainably market a small business. I hope that you’ll contribute your thoughts – what I’ve gotten right and wrong and what I’ve omitted – in the comments.

  1. Print all marketing materials on recycled paper. Whether you’re going to send out flyers, pamphlets or other marketing literature, make sure it’s on recycled paper.
  2. Hold your meetings remotely. As you meet with your colleagues, including external vendors, try to hold as many meetings as possible over the Internet. Try tools like Skype, TokBox and other free videoconferencing technologies.
  3. Send email  instead of paper newsletters. Not only will you save money by switching to an email marketing service, but you’ll also do far less damage to the environment. Even better from a business standpoint is that email marketing provides huge insights into how your marketing efforts are being received that printed flyers cannot. For instance, email marketing services can generally tell you what percentage of your emails were opened, how long they were opened and which links were clicked. [click to continue…]
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Jeffrey Hollender: Life after laundry soap

January 18, 2011

For Jeffrey Hollender, the longtime chief executive of Seventh Generation, business has always been about more than selling laundry detergent and paper towels.

At Seventh Generation, Hollender looked for ways to do business better–better for customers and their health, better for its workers (who were also owners) and better for the environment.

Those efforts came to a abrupt halt in October when he was unceremoniously ousted by Seventh Generation’s board, which was forced to choose between Hollender and Chuck Maniscalco, the CEO he’d recruited as his replacement 18 months ago.

The story behind the falling out remains murky. Neither Seventh Generation nor Hollender have been willing to air their dirty laundry, presumably because their break-up agreement included a promise not to speak ill of one another.

Hollender broke his silence last week, not to talk about the past, but to discuss his future, which he says will involve business and political work to address social and environmental problems that he thinks are mostly getting worse.

“I’m very worried about where the country is headed,” he told me, when we spoke by phone.

Jeffrey, who is 56, divides his time between Burlington, Vermont, where he has lived for years, and New York, where he grew up. (Disclosure: Jeffrey and my wife Karen Schneider were high school classmates.)

So what’s next? [click to continue…]

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Why acai? Ask the Sambazon guys

November 23, 2010

Jeremy and Ryan Black, with acai

Sometimes, for an entrepreneur, not knowing what you are getting into is a blessing.

If brothers Jeremy and Ryan Black had known what they were up against back in 2000 when they started Sambazon, a company that makes juices, sorbet and smoothie packs from tiny purple berries that grow in the Amazon forests of Brazil, they might not have bothered.

Few Americans then had heard of acai, or knew how to pronounce it. (It’s ah-sigh-ee.) The little berries from tall skinny palm trees can be harvested only once a year, they must be frozen right away to retain freshness and then shipped to the U.S. It’s a cash business, so importers must pay farmers long before the products are sold. And who, for goodness sakes, would sell them?

Harvesting acai

Nor did Jeremy or Ryan know much about the food business. Jeremy, the older bro, who’s now 37, was a financial planner. Ryan, who’s 35, was pursuing a professional football career as a defensive back, hoping to get to the NFL, after a season in the European football league.

All they knew was one thing. “Acai is amazing,” says Jeremy. And they had an idea that if they could figure out how to turn acai into a real business, they could not only do well for themselves but do some good for farmers in the Amazon. Says Ryan: “If this berry became a household word, it could be a really strong force for sustainability in the Amazon.”

It’s taken the Sambazon guys a decade, but things are looking up these days for their company. The No. 1 producer of organic acai, Sambazon doesn’t disclose sales–they were reported at $25 million in 2008–but the company says it is profitable. It employs about 150 people, half of them based in Brazil. You can find its products not only at smoothie bars and Whole Foods, but at mainstream retailers like Safeway and Giant. And the investors in the privately-held company include savvy food guys like Steve Demos, who founded White Wave and put Silk soy milk on supermarket shelves, and Gary Hirshberg, the CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farms. They also secured investments from Root Capital, a nonprofit social investment fund that’s intended to support sustainable livelihoods in the developing world, and from the EcoEnterprises fund run by The Nature Conservancy. [click to continue…]

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The Internet of parking spaces

November 14, 2010

Have you heard about the “Internet of things”? It’s a relatively new idea to me, although I note that the phrase gets about 2.2 million Google hits (at last count) and it has its own Wikipedia entry and a YouTube clip or two. As best as I can tell, it means that many things–cars, buildings, the electric grid, appliances, smart phones, cash registers–could be equipped with sensors, networked and thus able to communicate with one another and, of course, with the rest of us. To bring the concept down to earth, think of RFID codes on supermarket items that tell grocers when to restock, GPS phones equipped with Urbanspoon software that identifies nearby restaurants, or the work of startups like Historic Futures that help companies trace the origins of everything in their supply chain.

How not to park

Or “smart” parking spaces. Streetline is a San Francisco-based startup that wants to equip parking places with sensors and software so they can to talk to cars and the people who drive them. The company’s service is being pitched as a sustainability play–as a way to reduce traffic congestion, gasoline use and carbon emissions–but its success will more likely depend on whether it helps cities realize more revenue from parking meters, either through more effective enforcement or dynamic pricing of parking.

Still, for anyone who has circled a block endlessly looking for a spot, the idea has appeal.

“You can stand up in a room of 10 people or 1,000 people and ask them if they have had trouble finding a parking place and just about everybody raises their hand,” Zia Yusuf, the chief executive of Streetline, told me when we met recently in San Francisco.

“The carbon impact, the pollution impact, the congestion impact–it’s just been completely ignored,” Zia says.

Zia Yusuf

Streetline has deployed what it calls “ultra low power mesh sensor networks” in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sausalito, CA. What this means is that the company has installed sensors in the ground at parking places which “know” whether a car is parked there, as well as sensors on meters that “know” whether there’s time remaining or not. [click to continue…]

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Big business’s big innovation problem

October 21, 2010

To create a new green economy, industrial capitalism must destroy itself. Disruptive, radical, breakthrough innovation is needed, on a mass scale. Government isn’t delivering the change we need. Can business step up to the challenge?

Innovation is on my mind because I’m just back from the GreenBiz Innovation Forum, a two-day event devoted to “sustainable innovation.” The San Francisco confab brought together smart and dedicated business people who engaged in lots of stimulating conversation and did some fun stuff—like trying to build a tower out of uncooked spaghetti, tape and a marshmallow. There’s video, photo and print coverage here.

I came away wondering whether the emerging orthodoxy of green business – one that is willing to settle for incremental changes by big companies, and clever but insubstantial breakthroughs by small ones—is going to get us where we need to go.

Two examples:

Procter & Gamble sets “carbon intensity” targets, meaning that it will produce its products (Tide, Bounty, Cascade, Crest, etc) with less energy. But because of the company’s growth imperative, it will pollute more, not less, in absolutely terms. [See P&G: A bold green vision but...]

Stonyfield Farm devises a corn-based yogurt cup, which gets us closer to a zero-waste, cradle-to-cradle consumption model. But the bigger challenge is to get  petroleum out of cars, trucks and planes, not yogurt cups.

These initiatives deserve applause, and their stories are worth sharing. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that they are the kinds of innovations that will deliver the environmental change we need.

Tim O'Reilly

The GreenBiz event was a reminder that big, multibillion dollar corporations aren’t good at disruptive innovation, even when they try. They don’t attract the right people; inventors and creative thinkers are repelled by cultures with lots of meetings, process, politics, budgets  and bureaucracies. Big companies are slow to move. They aren’t about having fun—and as Internet mogul Tim O’Reilly noted in a lively and provocative talk at GreenBiz breakthroughs are often driven by people  (the Wright brothers, the hackers who started the computer revolution, the Google guys) who want to have fun or make something cool.

Even when facing existential threats, big companies don’t cannibalize themselves, as Clayton Christensen has written. Newspapers didn’t invent Craiglist, which destroyed their classified business. The record industry tried to fright iTunes. My cool new “barefoot” running shoes (below), which challenge the business of conventional running shoes,  come from Vibram, an upstart, not from Nike or Adidas. Ford and GM didn’t invent Zipcar, and BP ain’t going beyond petroleum. [click to continue…]

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Walmart’s trashy new pet project

October 7, 2010

PoochPlanet Dog Bed--yes it's green!

Walmart and one of its supplier are turning plastic bags, bottles, cardboard and hangars into beds for dogs and litter boxes for cats, along with other eco-friendly pet products.

This is the latest example of what’s called “cradle to cradle” design — although the cradle in question here turns out to be  a PoochPlanet Dog Bed, made from recycled plastic bottles.

“We’re committed to creating zero waste,” explains John Kunkel, senior buyer, pets for Walmart. One way to get there is to take things that Walmart throws away and instead of sending them to a landfill, make them into something useful.

Worldwise, a privately-held pet products company based in San Rafael, CA, is supplying the eco-friendly gear to Walmart, the companies said today. Besides the PoochPlanet beds, they include SmartyKat Cat Scratchers (made from recycled carbboard) and the SmartyKat Litter Accessories like the SmartyKat Litter LooLadle (made from recycled plastic hangars).

SmartyKat LooLadle

Worldwise has been a supplier to Walmart since 1996, when the giant retailer began selling its SuperScratcher, a cat scratcher made from corrugated cardboard and organic catnip. Aaron Lamstein, the company’s co-founded and executive chairman, told me, “We’re  the No. 1 supplier of certified organic catnip in the United States.”

(It never occurred to me that there was such a thing as certified organic catnip. As one of my high school teachers liked to say, you learn something new every day.)

Now, there’s something silly and something serious about this latest initiative from Walmart.

It’s silly because anyone who is committed to environmental responsibility would think long and hard about owning a cat or dog. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated the carbon impact of pets but it is clearly not trivial in the aggregate. A 2007 survey by the American Veterinary Medicine Association says Americans own are 72 million dogs, 82 million cats, 11 million pet birds and 7 million horses.  You’ll get a lot of arguments about this topic — particularly if you write a book called Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living — but pets obviously eat and poop**, two activities with undeniable impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, stocks of fish in the ocean and the like. Of course, as a former owner of a dog  (a golden retriever name Sophie, may she rest in peace), I’m well aware of the benefits that owning a pet can bring.

But it’s serious because efforts like this point the way to a more sustainable economy. One way to limit our use of oil and other raw materials is  to figure out ways to turn garbage into commodities that can be reused, as Walmart and Worldwise are doing.  (Here’s another example: Walmart is turning its food waste into compost in central Indiana, according to Indiana Living Green.) Without demand for recycled materials, the economics of recycling doesn’t work. But creating these “closed loop” systems that turn one man’s trash into another’s treasure is no easy feat, as Walmart’s Kunkel and Worldwise’s Lamstein explained to me.

Kunkel said the effort took more than a year and had to be coordinated with “seven or eight different divisions of the company.” After Walmart’s waste is baled, it is separated into its components at MRFs (materials recycling facilities) and the cardboard, bottles, hangars and plastic bags trucked to Worldwise’s manufacturing plants. The products that result are then shipped to distribution centers and to all of Walmart’s U.S. stores.

“We’ve had to create a playbook,” Kunkel said. “Now other manufacturers can implement a closed loop in their business.”

Lamstein said he brought the idea for what he’s calling Full Circle  products to Walmart after being invited to one of the retailer’s sustainability summits by former CEO Lee Scott. Many products that Worldwise makes are manufactured in China, he said–the firm has several offices there–but the nine products that are part of the Full Circle program are made in North America.

One problem: It’s hard to know just what environmental benefits, if any,  these products deliver, when compared to plastic or oil-based pet products, because neither Worldwise nor Walmart has done a Life Cycle Assessment to find out.

Then again, a product like the SuperScratcher that keeps a cat from destroying your furniture has its own set of environmental benefits.

“It helps prevent your $500 couch from ending up in the landfill,” Lamstein said.

Here’s a two-minute video of Lamstein explaining the “Full Circle” products, which, he says, are good for “our pets, our pocketbook and our planet.”

** According to a book with the inelegant title of Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind: “The nation’s 68 million pet dogs and 73 million pet cats produce an average of 100 pounds and 50 pounds of waste per animal, per year, respectively.”

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A super light prize-winning car

September 16, 2010

The Edison2 Very Light Car

Here’s a surprise: The biggest winner in the $10-million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE competition, which is designed to inspire a new generation of low-polluting cars, is not an electric car, but a car that weighs less than 1,000 pounds and is powered by an internal combustion engine.

The car is known, fittingly, as the Very Light Car #98, and it won the $5 million prize in the “mainstream” category, which required cars to seat four people, run on four wheels and have a driving range of at least 200 miles. The Very Light Car runs on E85, a blend of ethanol and gasoline, and it was built by a team known as Edison2, led by a German-born entrepreneur named Oliver Kuttner and based in Charlottesville, Va.

The Edison2 Very Light Car bested 111 competing teams and 136 cars from around the world. All sought to build practical safe and super fuel-efficient vehicles capable of achieving 100 miles per gallon or the energy equivalent—a threshold that the Very Light Car just managed to achieve, performing at 100.3 MPGe.

The team that developed the Very Light Car, which includes race car drivers who have won at  Le Mans, Daytona, and Sebring winners, decided to stick with an internal combustion engine because batteries add weight, as well as cost. While praising electric cars as “here to stay” on its blog, Edison2 says:

Currently, however, electrics cars have real issues. Batteries are heavy, big and costly. With electric drives cars get heavier, performance suffers and costs go up.

Kuttner, a race car driver, said the car, which is made of low-cost and recycleable materials, could potentially go on sale for $20,000 – if it reaches the market. There are no current plans for mass production, but Kuttner said he’s talked with several big companies, including General Motors, which tested the Edison2 in its wind tunnels. One obvious hurdle to be overcome is safety–the car isn’t equipped with air bags or other standard safety features and, presumably, it would come out on the losing end in a crash with a much heavier car or truck.

Li-Ion Wave II

Two battery-powered cars each won $2.5 million each in prize money. Li-ion Motors Corp.’s Wave II, built by a startup based in Charlotte, N.C., won in the “alternative side-by-side” category with a car that delivered 187 MPGe. This category included two-seaters where the driver and passenger sit side by side.

A car known as the E-Tracer 79, built by a Swiss company called X-Tracer and created by Arnold Wagner, a former SwissAir jumbo jet pilot and aircraft designer, won in the “alternative tandem class.” This category also includes cars that seat two people, but one can sit behind the other. While the E-Tracer may look more like a motorcycle than a car (see below), it has two additional wheels that fold into the car; they drop down at slower speeds to provide stability.

The E-Tracer was the efficiency king of the competition, registering an eye-popping 205.3 MPGe. (Results were verified by experts including U.S. Department of Energy labs.) It looks like the E-Tracer could be fun to drive, too!

X-Tracer's E-TracerThis morning, I attended the X-Prize awards ceremony, which was held outdoors in Washington and, oddly, featured a bunch of dignitaries, including House Speaker Pelosi, long-winded Congressman Ed Markey, and a DOE official, most of whom had little or nothing to do with the prize.

The contrast was unintended but hard to miss—between a national government that is paralyzed when it comes to climate and energy, and the inventiveness, creativity and energy of startups, engineers and entrepreneurs unleashed by a mere $10 million prize, which amounts to chump change in the federal budget.

Offer the right incentives, in other words, and human ingenuity can do wonders.

“We’re living in a day and time where literally anything is possible,” said Peter Diamandis, the X PRIZE Foundation Chairman and CEO. “A man or woman can go out and build a spaceship or a 100 mile per gallon car. This is only the beginning.”

Not to belabor the point, but neither of the government-backed automakers, GM or Chrysler, got into the contest.

Then again, the winners are in no sense amateurs or garage mechanics. The aerodynamic steel frame of the Edison2 car, for example, was designed by Barnaby Wainfan, a Northrop Grumman aerodynamics fellow, while the head designer for the team was Ron Mathis, who worked on the R10 for Audi Sport North America. The X-Prize judges said of the car:

More like an airplane than a car, Edison2 uses a highly innovative light-weight, low mass hub-mounted suspension for its aerodynamically flared four wheels. Its low total mass of 830 pounds – nearly a quarter of the average car weight- is a tribute of engineering strength and packaging utility.

Let’s hope Diamandis is right that this is just a beginning. The X-Prize’s first prize, for personal space transportation, gives reason for hope: It was awarded in 2004, and has since inspired an industry. Just today, Boeing said it has plans to fly tourists into space.

Below are a couple of snapshots I took at the X-Prize ceremonies. If you are reading this on Thursday, you can watch a one-hour documentary called “X PRIZE Cars: Accelerating The Future” tonight (September 16) at 9PM ET/6PM PT on the National Geographic Channel.

The Edison2 Very Light Car

E-Trace

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Will rooftop solar go mainstream?

August 11, 2010

It’s been a remarkable summer for SunRun, the San Francisco-based startup that’s trying to get solar power onto millions of residential rooftops. SunRun raised $100 million in project financing from utility PG&E. Venture capitalists invested another $55 million in the company. Home Depot agreed to distribute its rooftop solar panels, and Toll Brothers, the big home builder, is using SunRun’s solar leasing program to install PV panels on new homes in a luxury golf-course community in Yorba Linda, CA.

Today, SunRun enters Pennsylvania, its sixth state. You wouldn’t think of Pennsylvania as a solar-friendly state but, as it happens, the Keystone State has all the right ingredients–high and rising electricity prices, generous state subsidies for renewable energy, and a regulatory framework that permits homeowners to sell surplus power back to the electricity grid.

Says Lynn Jurich, the president and co-founder of SunRun: “We want to go to markets where we can save customers money, and where we can make money.”

I’ve written about SunRun before (See SunRun: A New Deal for Solar and Solar’s Strange Bedfellows) but the company is growing so fast, albeit off a small base, that it makes a lot of news. The PG&E, Home Depot and Toll Brothers agreements, along with its geographic expansion, all seem to  further validate the company’s business model. [click to continue…]

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