Groceries get greener

By Terri Winter

I’ve been taking on grown-up tasks since I was a kid. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t do my own laundry or pay my bills; when I didn’t have to balance school work, homework, and work work. But when I work all day and commute to get home, it takes more motivation than I can generally muster to go out grocery shopping instead of throwing my hands up, throwing my sweatpants on, and ordering take-out.

Grocery shopping isn’t a leisurely activity for my roommate and me anymore. It’s become this inconvenient, expensive, and time-consuming process we have to coordinate and plan our evenings around. It’s a full-out event that has to be planned, much like a dinner with a friend or movie date, but stripped of all enjoyment.

I’ve found it hard to be environmentally conscious and still get everything on the list. And it doesn’t feel good using plastic bags all the time (especially now that there’s a five cent reminder in Toronto).

According to Statistics Canada, in 2002, Canadian households produced 12 million tonnes of waste. Ontario and Quebec alone accounted for just over 65 percent of this. Sometimes it takes a hard fact like that to make you realize just how environmentally un-friendly traditional grocery shopping can be.

So I looked into Grocery Gateway. Founded in 1997, Grocery Gateway partnered with Longo Brothers Fruit Markets in 2004 to extend its service beyond the GTA. They offer a number of “green,” 100% organic and locally-grown items. With over 8,500 products, I have yet to find something Grocery Gateway doesn’t carry.

Imagine you and your neighbours all getting into your separate vehicles and heading out to the grocery store. That’s a lot of cars. Grocery Gateway does the driving for you, keeping more vehicles off the road — kind of like a carpool for groceries.

It also has driver route-plans, no-idling policies, and each truck runs using Bio-diesel fuel. Grocery Gateway uses recyclable and reusable cardboard boxes for deliveries, making plastic bags a thing of the past and greatly reducing the amount of household waste each year. Grocery Gateway also sends e-flyers and promotions to my email instead of paper flyers.

As the leading online, home-delivery grocery retailer in Canada, Grocery Gateway has grown to over 50,000 customers: including families, working professionals, people with limited transportation, students, and seniors.

Since using Grocery Gateway, we have fewer take-out containers in our garbage and we’re able to eat organically again, without draining our bank accounts.

Terri Winter is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Photo courtesy stock.xchng