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Ellwood Thompson's Local Market Brings Organic Growth to Columbia Heights - Tues., Oct. 7, 2008 - Richmond, VA - Ellwood Thompson's is pleased to announce its expansion into Washington, DC. As the company prepares for its twentieth anniversary, it will open a new store to serve the Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods. The new store will be located in the DC USA development at 14th and Irving Streets, NW, adjacent to the Columbia Heights Metro station. Read release
A New Coffee and Tea Café in Carytown - Thurs., March 13, 2008 - Richmond, VA - Some wonderful things grow in the shade. Coffee for starters. In fact, shade-planted on small lots is the way coffee was intended to be grown. Ellwood Thompson's will be serving up plenty of shade-grown varieties from regional supplier Counter Culture Coffee in its new coffee and tea café. Read release
Media Coverage
By GREGORY J. GILLIGANTIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Ellwood Thompson's Local Market is growing again.
The natural-foods market is:
· Adding about 2,500 square feet by expanding into the adjacent coin-operated laundry at Ellwood Avenue and North Thompson Street. The extra space will allow the market to enlarge its kitchen and produce department. The expansion should be completed by late summer.
· Opening a café -- the name has not been determined yet -- in space across the parking lot from the store. The café is slated to open this summer.
It will operate from 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. and have light fare and wine in the evenings.
· Moving its bakery operations across Thompson Street in the space formerly used by Metro Bakery. Ellwood's Bakehouse won't sell any bakery goods there -- those items will be sold at the store and café.
But Williams Bakery of Mechanicsville will operate a retail shop up front.
Ellwood Thompson’s Local Market Expands
Thompson Takeover
The Blue Fox Café, where High’s sandwich shop held forth for decades, closed last week. Natural foods neighbor Ellwood Thompson’s has acquired the space across the parking lot and will use its kitchen for the store’s expanded prepared-foods section and potentially a new restaurant. .
The timing coincides with the arrival of chef Jannequin Bennett, formerly of TJ’s at The Jefferson Hotel, who will mastermind the vegetarian-rich offerings and other fare. The grocery is repositioning after the loss of longtime general manager Wade Carmichael to Ukrop’s, reportedly to fend off the Whole Foods competition and the expansion of Fresh Market in an increasingly competitive grocery environment.
Ellwood Thompson’s expands -- kind of
Ellwood Thompson has acquired the Blue Fox Cafe space on the other side of their parking lot. They plan to expand their food prep business into the space with possible future plans of a restaurant or maybe even a retail joint. (post references the news release)
Ellwood Thompson's Adds 1,600 Feet of Cooking Space - November 08, 2007
Our organic friends at Ellwood Thompson's Local Market are expanding, and the beneficiaries will be pretty much anyone who gazes longingly at the prepared foods available in the Carytown grocery store. (post references the news release)
ET Eliminates Use of Plastic Bags at Checkout -- Richmond.com’s Renewable Richmond - Tuesday, December 11, 2007
While many businesses are resistant to change, Ellwood Thompson's is leading the way of being green.
Here's something fundamental to remember when thinking about any company's efforts to get greener: No business is in the business of going out of business.
In other words, no company that plans to stick around past next week, no matter how well meaning and eco-friendly, will enact programs that put its bottom line in danger. And in general, the smaller the company, the more important that rule becomes because insolvency is never far from the minds of small-business owners.
When Wal-Mart recently began its push to promote compact fluorescent light bulbs last year, adding a huge amount of inventory and giving CFLs higher visibility in stores, only a small part of their calculus was the environment. The main part was business. This was a way for Wal-Mart to save its customers money – on energy bills – while making money for itself. To expect any company to act differently is to fundamentally misunderstand its reason for existing.
But where going green dovetails with greening the bottom line is where you'll find change that isn't just "greenwashing," and that's where businesses can have the greatest impact.
Take Richmond's own Ellwood Thompson's. The local supermarket has been committed to sustainability for years, buying wind credits that offset 100 percent of its energy usage (www.renewablechoice.com). Now the store is going even further to promote sustainable practices. It's hired a "green consultant" to help guide it through its new "GreenPath" campaign.
The most visible part of the new ET green push will begin in 2008. When it opens on Jan. 2, Ellwood Thompson's will have done away with plastic bags.
"They're made from petroleum. They wind up in landfills. They don't biodegrade," said ET marketing director Lesley Johnson, ticking off the plastic bags' rap sheet.
The plastic bags will be replaced by bags made of bagasse, a byproduct of sugar production. Bagasse is the biomass remaining after stalks of sugarcane are crushed to extract their juice. Besides bags, it's also used as a tree-free alternative for making paper. The process requires no bleaching and the end result is more biodegradable.
Johnson said ET will encourage customers to put the bagasse bags in their compost piles at home because they'll likely biodegrade faster there than in a landfill.
Like many supermarkets, ET also encourages customers to buy and reuse mesh bags that it sells at checkout. ET is even looking into a bag swap program where customers would take canvas or mesh bags home and then return them to be used again by other customers.
Bag non grata
Environmentalists shun plastic bags, urge everyone to get reusable ones -- Thursday, Dec 13, 2007 - 12:09 AM
By KARIN KAPSIDELIS, TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Plastic bags at the checkout aisle used to be a choice. Now they're at the center of a public debate.
Widely denounced as "Earth's nemesis" because they're made from oil and threaten wildlife, the ubiquitous bag has become the latest test of the environmental mettle for grocery shoppers.
The solution for many is to bring their own bags to market.
Ukrop's, which introduced a 99-cent reusable bag in September, said yesterday that it has sold 80,000 of the bags and given 162,470 5-cent credits to customers using them. The supermarket chain said shoppers reusing paper bags have received 212,688 credits since September.
On Jan. 2, Ellwood Thompson's Local Market will stop using plastic bags and raise to 10 cents a bag the credit it gives customers who bring their own.
"They do not compost, they do not biodegrade and they are so dangerous to wildlife," marketing director Lesley Johnson said in explaining Ellwood Thompson's objection to petroleum-based plastic bags.
The issue is likely to come before the General Assembly when it convenes next month. The Isle of Wight County Board of Supervisors has adopted a resolution asking the assembly to give cities and counties the power to ban plastic bags.
Supervisor Thomas J. Wright said the issue was brought to his attention by county farmers.
"When they pick the cotton, the bags get in the combine," he said. As a result, plastic gets entwined with the cotton that is sent to the gin. It melts during processing, leaving farmers with "white specks all over their cloth."
"The farmers are getting a lower price for their product," he said.
. . .
The James River Garden Club is hoping to put Richmond on the map -- somewhere between San Francisco and Bangladesh -- with its campaign against the bags. The club this month began selling a reusable bag made of recycled cotton and within 10 days had sold almost 500.
"We hit a nerve that was already there," said Chamie Valentine, who co-chairs the club's conservation committee with Aurelia Lewis.
"People are being bombarded with so many go-green messages," Lewis said. But she's finding they are receptive to this one when they learn how harmful the bags can be.
Not only do the bags consume large amounts of oil, they're also blamed for the deaths each year of about 100,000 sea turtles and other marine animals, which mistake them for food. Floating in the ocean, a plastic bag looks a lot like a jelly fish.
In a field in Isle of Wight, the bags look like a meal, too. Wright says a farmer recently told him one of his cows died after eating a bag.
The bags have been all but banned in places as diverse as San Francisco and Bangladesh, where they were blamed for clogged drainage lines that caused major flooding. In some countries, including Ireland, they're taxed. Closer to home, Annapolis, Md., last month went through an acrimonious debate over a proposal to ban the bags to protect the Chesapeake Bay. That proposal was sent to a study committee.
. . .
The industry is beginning to take note of the bag backlash: The chemical company BASF, for example, says its new Ecoflex plastic is shelf stable for one year and will then completely decompose in compost within a few weeks.
Bags are being recycled. Trex Co., based in Winchester, makes composite lumber for decks from recycled plastics and waste wood. The company estimates it receives about 50 percent of the recycled grocery bags available on the market.
Most area grocery stores have joined the effort to reduce bag consumption, either by collecting bags for recycling or offering discounts to customers who bring their own.
The Ukrop's bags hold up to 35 pounds of groceries and are recyclable. Ellwood Thompson's will introduce a similar bag that will sell for $1.99. It plans to give away 100 bags a day during the first week of January to help ease customers into the store's new no-plastic policy.
Ellwood Thompson's will also carry the James River Garden Club's bag. That bag is designed to do more than just carry groceries. One side proclaims in big blue letters "This Is An Anti-Plastic Bag."
"This is shouting it," said club member Sarah Rowland. "But we need to shout it."
The bag, which sells for $8, comes with information to get people thinking about how they contribute to the problem. It notes, for example, that the average family accumulates 60 plastic bags in only four trips to the grocery store.
Archives
Ellwood Thompson’s Local Market Expansion in Carytown – Nov. 6, 2007
ET's Bans High Fructose Corn Syrup – Jan. 2, 2007
Ellwood Thompson's Buys Wind Power! – Jan. 27, 2006
Media Contacts
All media requests may be directed to Lesley Johnson at ljohnson@ellwoodthompsons.com or 804.612.1024, ext. 13
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