Growing Sustainably
Rene Feliciano clocks in at 6:30 on Monday morning. By nine o’clock, she has helped pack a small fleet of trucks to supply a handful of California’s supermarkets and restaurants. One big rig heads up the Pacific Coast to Eureka; two more traverse the great Central Valley destined for Sacramento and Fresno; another heads south across the Santa Cruz Mountains. Their cargo: organic produce from one of San Francisco’s greenest wholesale distributors.
As facilities manager and leader of the company’s Green Team, it’s part of Feliciano’s job to make Veritable Vegetable as environmentally friendly as possible. That includes making sure the thousands of long- and short-haul trips the truckers make annually are as productive as possible, and greening the  company’s operations.
“When it started, I was supposed to take care of getting us to zero waste,” said Feliciano. “As we progressed, we ran out of things to divert and when we started to question everything, the program blossomed into all different areas of our business.”

Veritable Vegetable started addressing environmental challenges long before green had serious cachet.  And there’s been no shortage of things to do. Since the sustainability dimension to her position was created three years ago, Feliciano has been busy finding ways to change the business’ physical plant and office culture.
The wholesaler’s efforts began with a lighting retrofit to its main warehouse, switching out fluorescent tube lighting for energy-efficient high-bay lights and ballasts. Much of the warehouse space needs only intermittent lighting so adding motion sensors allowed the company to keep lights off for most of the day when rooms are unoccupied. A combination of skylights and lumen sensors allowed Veritable Vegetable to dim the interior lights around the loading dock and central floor on sunny days. The net result: electricity use plummeted even as the business grew.
Veritable Vegetable grew by an average of seven percent annually from 2001 to 2008, and  added 50 percent more warehouse space in 2007. But some benefits are hard to quantify and don’t show up on the balance sheet.  For example, employees are offered numerous food programs that reduce the distance from farm to table while simultaneously increasing job satisfaction. They have the option of buying into a worker food share cooperative, enrolling in a juice program and getting catered lunches four times a week.

A sustainability ethos has long been part of the company’s creed. Veritable Vegetable was founded in 1974 with progressive ideals of social and environmental responsibility.  In a field dominated by large food producers and suppliers, Veritable Vegetable made a commitment to promoting smaller farms that offer fresh and healthy food and give back to their communities.
 That spirit lives on today in all aspects of the business. This winter, Veritable Vegetable added a 106-kilowatt solar array that will pay for itself in just four years, providing nearly cost-free electricity thereafter.
The company continues to invest in its employees as well. In 2006, Veritable Vegetable moved their locker room downstairs and added a bike rack to provide better commute options. It offers travel reimbursement for public transportation trips up to $115 a month so that workers don’t have to rely on a car to get to work.
Other changes are common practices for many San Francisco businesses. Sunset Scavenger, San Francisco’s municipal waste management company, has offered recycling and organic waste pick-up for many years. Yet Veritable Vegetable has gone above and beyond by diverting 99 percent of its waste from landfills through recycling, composting and clever reuse. For example, Feliciano devised a way to use Mylar wrap from food packaging as insulation for ductwork in the warehouse. The company also invested in a baler that compresses cardboard shipping boxes for recycling. Large items that can’t be readily sold, such as old furniture and computers, are taken to local nonprofits like the Scroungers’ Center for Reusable Art Parts (SCRAP) and Building Resources center.
Other green strategies are more specific to the food services industry. Between two warehouses, Veritable Vegetable has 350,000 cubic feet of cold storage space, all of which must be carefully controlled at different temperatures based on food type. The company has calibrated its thermostats to the temperature of the food instead of the ambient air temperature to avoid over-cooling. In addition, to minimize the loss of cold air when workers enter and exit the coolers, the company invested in heavy strip curtains that improve insulation and last longer than the cheaper, thinner curtains.
The improvements Veritable Vegetable has made result in fewer greenhouse gases polluting the air, whether it’s indirect emissions from power plants supplying electricity and organic waste decomposing in landfills, or direct emissions from vehicles. But that distant-seeming connection to global temperature is less important to the company than bringing the green message to people on a daily basis.
“Sustainability is actually a company directive that has spilled over into everybody’s life,” said Feliciano. “Because of the awareness and our mission statement, I think other people are catching on and thinking differently and purchasing differently. Now we have options when we spend our dollar.”
Stopping global warming requires thinking in new ways about how we live, do business and interact with one other. While climate policy is finally at the forefront of national political discussions, its impact will have decidedly local and personal effects. Each of us is part of the solution and what we do at home and work affects us, our children, and communities around the world. Reversing the trend of rapid resource depletion and growing risks of a climate gone haywire requires engaging our families, neighbors, businesses and elected and appointed officials in ways that make our communities more sustainable.
Environmental Defense Fund is committed to “finding the ways that work” to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. One of our projects, called Climate for Community, is demonstrating what small businesses and San Francisco Bay Area residents are doing to engage their communities in the fight against global warming.