Blue Ribbon Foods Goes Carbon Neutral

Helping our Customers Reduce their Carbon Footprint

Why does Blue Ribbon Foods care about becoming Carbon Neutral? Because just as we strive to give you the purest and healthiest foods possible, we are also committed to reducing our impact on the environment. And by becoming Carbon Neutral, we also help our customers lower their carbon footprint.

That's why we deliver, saving the average family two trips per month to the grocery store. If each round trip is only 10 miles and the cars average 20 miles per gallon, we save 144,000 gallons of gasoline. Each gallon of gasoline emits 8.78kg (19.3 lbs) of CO2 into the atmosphere. Therefore we are reducing CO2 emissions by 1,264,320 kg (2,781,504 lbs), which is equal to taking about 230 cars off the road annually.

Even our packaging system used for proteins are vacuum sealed in biodegradable Iolon film (instead of being wrapped in plastic with a Styrofoam trey like you see in the supermarket). That's a savings of 1.8 million Styrofoam treys per year.

By recycling over 100,000 cardboard boxes a year, we reduce our annual CO2 emissions by another 8.6 metric tons. Our reusable delivery totes save approximately 120,000 additional cardboard boxes—stopping another 103,200 kg of CO2 emissions from being released into the atmosphere.

Here are some other actions we've taken to reduce our impact on the environment:

• Shred and recycle all of our menus and other paperwork in our offices.
• Send all of our renderings (bone, fat, etc.) from our production facilities to other companies to be recycled.
• Use energy saving fluorescents for all of our lighting needs in our plants and offices.
• Use steam or all-natural-biodegradable products when cleaning all our production facilities and offices.
• Use a proprietary blend of biodiesel for our fleet of trucks.

Because we still require electricity and natural gas to serve you, we "neutralize" our remaining carbon footprint by funding offset projects that either sequester CO2 from the air or eliminate the creation of greenhouse gases. All offset projects are purchased from Verus Carbon Neutral and are third-party verified by the Chicago Climate Exchange.