Thrive Market Wants to Be the First Climate Positive Grocer
This article originally appeared in Presence Marketing’s June 2021 Newsletter
Thrive Market, the online natural products retail marketplace founded in 2014 by Nick Green, Gunnar Lovelace, Kate Mulling and Sasha Siddhartha, has set a new goal to become the nation’s first “climate-positive grocer.” The company saw sales skyrocket in 2020 during the pandemic and now CEO Nick Green says it wants to take those profits – and momentum – to pursue how it can reduce plastic packaging and overall waste, among other objectives.
“We are committing to not only minimize our negative environmental impact, but have a net positive effect on the climate specifically,” Green told Forbes Magazine. “The big message that we’re trying to send, which we hope other companies will embrace as well, is that doing less harm isn’t enough. We should all be thinking about what we can do to actually make things better to help heal the planet after a century in which we’ve done more harm than all prior centuries combined. Specifically, at Thrive Market that means committing to going carbon negative as a company by 2025 (right now we are carbon neutral), making our zero waste practices official with a TRUE Zero Waste certification in 2022, and going fully plastic neutral, as well, by 2023. We’re already proud to be the largest grocer ever to receive B Corp certification and looking forward to recertifying in October 2023 with even stronger commitments to both social impact, environmental stewardship and investment in our people,” Green told Forbes.
Said Thrive Market’s Chief Merchandising Officer Jeremiah McElwee, “The biggest inherent challenge is balancing out high quality, value and values-driven products being packaged in truly environmentally responsible formats. At present, those options can still cost five to 10 times what the more conventional options cost. So you can have a product that retails for $1.99 and the package itself costs $1. That means the customer would have to pay that premium when just affording healthy, organic food can be a challenge for many on a limited budget. Our approach is to create step functions so that we start with reduction always, then we move toward innovation and, ultimately, end of life solutions. Right now we have multiple pilots exploring both compostability and upcycling solutions for our shipping materials and product packaging,” he told Forbes.
As part of its Climate Positive initiative, the company identified three key areas of focus: carbon footprint, zero waste, and excess plastic. For more information on Thrive Market’s commitment to becoming the world’s first climate positive grocery store, visit here.