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spud Follow: Your Local Food Movement; Vancouver, British Columbia; Food/Beverage; Interests: Community Development, Eco-friendly Production, Food & Agriculture; http://www.spud.ca

About spud

Our Story

David Van Seters first got the idea for Spud in 1995 when, as a sustainability business consultant, he studied the economics of sustainable community food systems. Through that work he became much more aware of the concentration of power in the conventional food industry and how little trickles down to the independent farmers and artisan producers.

He was looking to start a small green business to demonstrate that it was possible to run an eco-friendly, socially responsible business and also make a profit and the home delivery model seemed to have all the elements.

It offered huge environmental benefits like reducing grocery store car trips, generating 80% less food waste, eliminating plastic bags and grocery flyers, and expanding organic agriculture. It also offered significant social benefits because the direct delivery model creates direct connections between food suppliers and customers and the avoided shopping trips simplify peoples’ lives. Finally, on the economic side, it seemed that the savings of not having a high rent grocery store would offset the cost of the delivery vans while still allowing us to offer competitive prices and free delivery.

So he named the company Small Potatoes Urban Delivery (Spud for short), rented a low-rent warehouse, hired 3 staff, and started deliveries a full range of groceries so that our customers could avoid a shopping trip. That was 12 years ago. Now we have 200 staff, operate in seven cities across the west coast of North America, and have over 16,000 customers. However, unlike the big grocery store chains, we have stayed decentralized. In each location, we hire locally, buy locally, deliver locally, and re-invest our profits locally.