Greenling: Food as Fresh as You Can Get

“Greenling was born really out of a pas­sion for sus­tain­abil­ity,” Arnold, co-founder of Greenling, told Organic Connections. “I had pre­vi­ous com­pa­nies in organic land­scap­ing and other related fields, but when I researched sus­tain­abil­ity, I felt like our major chal­lenges were energy, water and food. And then as I looked into food I real­ized it was cen­tral to every­thing, because agri­cul­ture uses more fos­sil fuels than any­thing except our cars, and more potable water than all other human con­sump­tion com­bined. So I had this epiphany that if we fixed the food sys­tem, so many other things would take care of them­selves. I got together with some col­lege bud­dies and started research­ing food and where we thought we could make a dif­fer­ence. We decided get­ting food from the farm to the table was a bet­ter way, so we hit the ground running.”

Greenling func­tions pretty much as any online buy­ing expe­ri­ence would—but most online ser­vices aren’t try­ing to pro­vide food at its fresh­est point. “We took a few years to just really build out the web­site tech­nol­ogy and inven­tory man­age­ment, which is exceed­ingly dif­fi­cult when work­ing with super-fresh per­ish­able food,” Arnold said. “Farmers bring us prod­uct after we already know how many orders we have. Often it is picked early in the morn­ing, brought to us mid­morn­ing, and we pack it in the after­noon and deliver in the evening. That’s as fresh as food can get.”

To round out the selec­tion and con­tinue to ser­vice cus­tomers, Greenling does have to buy some non­lo­cal items, espe­cially when they’re not in sea­son. “We want to be con­ve­nient and we want peo­ple to eat more local, but we also want to give them the best food avail­able when local is not avail­able,” Arnold said. “So we still have apples and bananas and things even when they’re not grow­ing in Texas, but any­thing that is not local is cer­ti­fied organic.”

Being a pur­veyor of local and sus­tain­able food isn’t just a mat­ter of sign­ing up with a cou­ple of dis­trib­u­tors to main­tain sup­plies. Greenling must con­stantly source the food they are sell­ing. “Initially we will go to farm­ers’ mar­kets,” Arnold explained. “We give them infor­ma­tion and just talk about what we do and how we work. Then, like in Austin, after a few years we got a rep­u­ta­tion because we absolutely take care of our farm­ers, give them fair prices, are easy to work with and have flex­i­ble receiv­ing. Now farm­ers are approach­ing us all the time, so we get the best pick of the local agriculture.”

Greenling also has a chal­lenge in obtain­ing cus­tomers. This is solved with con­sis­tent out­reach. “We do a lot of com­mu­nity involve­ment, and try to really get involved with local food sys­tems,” Arnold con­tin­ued. “We spon­sor farm­ers’ mar­kets in town and go to envi­ron­men­tally con­scious events. We do a good bit of online adver­tis­ing as well, since we are an online com­pany, and it is pretty easy for peo­ple to click through an ad and then build a bas­ket and get started.”

The recent grow­ing aware­ness of local and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture has been of assis­tance. “There’s def­i­nitely been a major groundswell in the last cou­ple of years,” said Arnold. “There’s still a lot of work to do in edu­ca­tion, but aware­ness has been really gain­ing steam, so we’re very happy about that.”   

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All of this has meant that Greenling has been grow­ing. “The response has been awe­some,” Arnold reported. “We have been extremely well received in Austin. We launched Dallas just in February, and it’s already almost as big as Austin in just three months. We’re excited about that and we’re excited to go to other mar­kets
as well.”

Arnold clearly intends to expand beyond the Lone Star State. “We believe that for any com­mu­nity that wants to rebuild local food sys­tems this is a great piece of the puz­zle,” Arnold said. “We think farm­ers’ mar­kets are impor­tant, and we think hav­ing local and organic and brick-and-mortar retail is impor­tant too. But our model fills the gap between those and pro­vides a bet­ter alter­na­tive for farm­ers, a bet­ter sales chan­nel for them. We will launch Houston next year and then we’ll launch another 5–10 mar­kets in the next cou­ple of years. We’re excited to go all over the place and really try to help local farms.”

But for Arnold, Greenling means a lot more than sim­ply a thriv­ing busi­ness. “My per­sonal mis­sion is to help our cul­ture move closer to sus­tain­abil­ity,” he con­cluded. “I think sus­tain­abil­ity is a set of guid­ing prin­ci­ples, not really a des­ti­na­tion, and per­son­ally I see a lot of the things that we’re doing in our cul­ture as unsus­tain­able. So I want to help us move toward that goal and have a big­ger and big­ger impact, and hope­fully influ­ence things like health­care and energy and water.”

For more infor­ma­tion, visit www.greenling.com.