Social Responsibility: Best Practices

City Fresh Foods is a rich example of a company that tightly integrates a commitment to social and environmental responsibility with a commitment to serving communities of color.


City Fresh Foods Logo
"When I asked at a community meeting in Dorchester how we can take advantage of creating the greener economy, I got total silence. People didn't even know how to respond to that." says City Fresh Food's founder and CEO, Glynn Lloyd.

Lloyd knew he had his work cut out for him in greening the food supply in his low-income community, so it wasn't news to him. "My family grew up in the neighborhood, so I know the concerns of the people in my community and this isn't typically something at the tops of people's minds."

Working as a teacher in a poor area of Louisiana, Glynn began to consider what he could do to uplift the whole black community. His attention soon turned to food. "I realized that we needed to start controlling our own food supply and take charge of that, so I started researching food issues," says Lloyd.

It wasn't long before Glynn discovered that, "as you pull back the onion and look at how food is grown, how it's distributed, and things like how we're overharvesting our fish stock, you soon realize that the whole system itself is in jeopardy. So when I started City Fresh Foods, it was always about both social equity and environmental wisdom. If you look at our numbers and how we're doing it, you'll see that we've stayed true to the mission."

Today, City Fresh is increasingly using fresh, local beef and organic vegetables to provide over 4,000 meals a day to seniors, school children and other underserved members of their community. "These are small steps but they're expandable. As we green our food supply, we'll have fresher, local products and real benefits for people and the food system," says Lloyd.

And the company's environmental leadership doesn't stop there. City Fresh is taking a practical but comprehensive approach to greening its entire operation. "We're doing paper recycling, composting, water savers, green cleaning products and energy-saving lights–and we're reducing our overall carbon footprint," says Lloyd.

The company's current challenge for itself is keeping per-plate food costs low while systematically increasing its percentage of locally-produced foods, a mandate that requires far greater care and attention than the traditional approach. "We now have a local food project deliver apples to us, so that helps us meet our goals and supports a great local program," says Lloyd, "but it's certainly not as easy as ordering all our fruits from one distributor."

Aside from the challenging economics of the food service business, Lloyd points to challenges in educating his customers as well. "While understanding the importance and value of fresh, natural food is a given in other communities, it's not in ours. Here, for example, even though breastfeeding is clearly the healthiest and cheapest option, bottle-feeding is just accepted as the way you do things. The point I'm making in the community though is that growing and preparing healthy food locally is not something that white, middle-class people created."

City Fresh Foods is now a nationally recognized minority-owned company and was ranked by Inc. magazine as one of the Top Urban Businesses in the USA in 2002, 2003 and 2005. "Over the years, we have experienced steady growth of up to 30% a year," says Lloyd. "This enables us to create opportunities for local residents to start and eventually own their own businesses. The previous generation of business owners in my community were successful because of supplier diversity.  They broke into (or through) the old boys network to get a piece of the pie. My approach is more from the ground up, so we're doing everything in our power to keep the money in our community."

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