This post initiates a new category, Green Business. I’d like to start posting not only the names of businesses we think are run in environmentally friendly ways, but also what it is that they are doing that we think is so friendly. We need to define the category, not just fill it up!
So here’s an example:
My fiancee and I had an appointment this morning with Michelle Garcia, European-trained pastry chef, and owner of The Bleeding Heart Bakery, 2018 West Chicago (near Damen) — to order our wedding cake. Here are some of the things she does in her business that make me glad to add her to this Green Business category:
- Bakes with organic, locally sourced ingredients
- Uses fruits that are in season, so no raspberry cakes in December!
- Sells milk from Illinois dairies
- Buys flowers and other ingredients at local farmers’ markets
- Helped start the new, Faith in Place organic bread bakery, The Good Loaf
- Offers lots of vegan pastries
- Is working on installing the nation’s first solar pastry oven
- Offered me a glass, not a paper/plastic cups, of water
- Uses napkins made from recycled paper
These are all things I learned in the course of doing business with her. I never asked her to make her case, these things are just obvious!
Then the bottom line is still taste: she makes incredible little single-serving quiches, phenomenal ginger cookies, and can accommodate special dietary needs in cakes and other things.
I’m hoping to swing by there this Saturday to pick up some samples for our healthy foods potluck class. And very much looking forward to being married, and digging into the wedding cake we ordered!
