The Local Catch

During our adventure to the Pawtucket Farmer’s Market I stumbled upon The LocalCatch among many other fresh seafood alternatives. The Local Catch is a local Rhode Island seafood processor and wholesaler that markets local seafood to local consumers. The Local Catch Inc. was founded in 2010 by 30-year fishing veteran Captain Richard Cook (Left) and his wife Ann. Together, Rich and Ann continuously support New England fisherman by providing the freshest, highest-quality seafood to local markets. This sustainable practice stimulates the economy and allows local commercial fisherman to stay in business by capitalizing on Rhode Island’s natural seafood resources. After a brief discussion with Captain Rich himself, it became very apparent that he was knowledgeable of the industry, specifically: what to catch, where to catch it, when it’s in season, and how to keep it fresh during transport. Captain Rich also mentioned the success of a recent addition to The Local Catch - fresh seafood deliveries. Customers can place orders for seafood to be delivered right to their doorstep on thelocalcatch.com. Furthermore, customers have the ability to opt into a weekly e-newsletter that elaborates on the weekly catch, what seafood is in season, and recipe recommendations used by Rich and his community of local fishermen.

Learn more about local contributors to the Pawtucket Farmer’s Market and about our upcoming trip to Costa Rica on Twitter @BryantMKT421 or on our semester-long blog at http://www.bryantmkt421.blogspot.com/.

 

La Quinta

La Quinta

During our stay at La Quinta in Sarapiqui, our class was invited to adhere to sustainable practices that have guided the Inn since its establishment in 1993. Owners Beatriz and Leo transformed a former orange farm that was depleted of its natural vegetation into a regenerative environment suitable for an eco-friendly hotel. La Quinta – translated to “The House” – and its guests strive to co-exist harmoniously with nature.

Sustainability

La Quinta possesses the highest qualification offered by the Costa Rican Tourists Board at the Fifth Leaf Level of the Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST). The CST is a comprehensive program that categorizes and certifies each tourism company to the degree they comply with the model of sustainable tourism. Out of the four hotels we explored during our trip La Quinta, at the Fifth Leaf Level, is considered the most sustainable by these standards. Beatriz frequently commented on the overwhelming amount of effort needed to achieve this qualification including: great investments in time and money, ability to maintain complete and accurate paperwork to validate claims of sustainability, and community engagement.

ü  Some Efforts Include:

o   Regenerative agriculture à organic farming intended to build soil health

o   Reforestation à restocking existing forests with native plants

o   Bio-digesting facility à collects sewage and harnesses the gas emitted from separating solids and liquids for alternative sources of energy

o   Saltwater pool à avoids using harmful, unnatural chemicals found in traditional chlorine pools

o   Bulb transition à converted traditional $.05 bulbs to long-term, low-voltage bulbs at $10 each for energy conservation

It was very apparent that La Quinta was a life-long investment for Beatriz and Leo’s family. Prior to its establishment Beatriz asserted that, “The idea of La Quinta was more of a dream than a reality.” Her passion for the development of the Inn was very sincere, and after fifteen years the family advanced from one to five Leaves.

                                                             Community

Most qualified participants in the Certification for Sustainable Tourism lack community engagement, a contributing factor to achieving the coveted fifth Leaf Level. La Quinta is unique to the other three hotels in that it heavily relies on the greater community for support. For example, the inclusive package to accommodate guests at La Quinta does not include the price of meals throughout the day. This intention enables guests to explore and buy food from nearby farmers or providers. This increases the volume of exchanges and stimulates the local economy. Further, most organic produce that was not grown on-site at La Quinta was sourced from these local providers as a means of supporting the community. Additionally, La Quinta makes it a priority to employ the citizens of Sarapiqui in order to offer stable job opportunities. La Quinta ventures farther than just employment, and participates in the Happy Schools Program to provide educational opportunity. During the Happy Schools Program, La Quinta sends representatives to seven local schools to educate students on sustainable practices and bio-diversity. Here students are given an educational foundation on what it means to be sustainable and how to make an impact. More simply put, it’s the hotel’s way of giving back. It is these distinguishing factors that separate La Quinta from the two four Leaf hotels, the Hilton Double Tree and Mountain Paradise Hotels.

Ethan Agnello @BryantMKT421

Laguna Lodge

Traveling by boat to the lodge!

On Day 4 of our adventure in Costa Rica, we traveled by boat on a narrow canal to the Laguna Lodge in Tortuguero. Built between a lagoon and the Caribbean Sea, boats are the only form of transportation to and from the premises. Upon arrival, our group was very surprised to see a dozen bats and a small, furry raccoon friend joining in on our meeting. Because the lodge attempts to co-exist with its native surroundings, the people of Laguna Lodge embrace the animals’ presence where it was more alarming to us as guests. It is difficult to imagine having to either grow or produce everything locally or import it by boat, as the Laguna Lodge has done for many years. Essential commodities like food, bottled water, gasoline, and healthcare products have to be transported by boat to these remote locations. Although a difficult feat by itself, locals in Tortuguero have adapted to the unpredictable climate and torrential downpours as well.

Living within flourishing wetlands and the vibrant jungle, the Laguna Lodge puts in extra efforts to remain sustainable by preserving the land and protecting some of nature’s most bio-diverse ecosystems. Some of the Lodge’s sustainable efforts that we learned about include:

Displaying the eco-friendly bleaches

• Biodegradable product usage
• Beach cleaning programs
• Tortuguero national park regulation policies and wildlife management policies such as don't feed, don't touch
• Eco friendly bleaches: Eerva and Zeobrite
• Water management programs - filter system to avoid pollution into water
• Solid waste classification at Tortuguero recycling center
• Use of hydroelectric power and geothermal energy from volcanoes 

Laguna Lodge goes beyond just reducing their carbon footprint by educating students and tourists to help accelerate the environmental changes. The lodge even donated land for the construction of the Tortuguero high school demonstrating its commitment to the community. Unfortunately tourism, although having a large positive impact on the economy, is the number one contributor towards pollution, followed by the diesel used to transport the tourists and cargo. Not only does the combustion of fossil fuels pollute the water, but the heavy reliance on boats for transportation results in noise pollution to the natural habitats in the rainforest. Despite these byproducts of everyday life, Laguna Lodge is all about giving back to the community from welfare measures for the employees to a code of conduct against commercial sexual exploitation of adolescents. The Laguna Lodge also offers music programs to manifest involvement in the youth population to avoid prostitution.

Laguna Lodge is built on ethical business practices dedicated to preserving the land while supporting the community. Despite the greater expense associated with these initiatives they are still able to provide their guests a lovely stay. We enjoyed delicious meals with a beautiful view, a canal boat tour to learn about the native plants and animals, fun salsa lessons, relaxing pools and hammocks, sandy beach walks, and night star gazing. I think our whole group really enjoyed our time at the lodge while learning about their sustainability practices and the local community of Tortuguero.

Check out Laguna Lodge on Twitter! @Lagunalodgecr or on Facebook! And follow our Bryant Marketing Sustainability on Twitter! @BryantMKT421

Krysia Syska

Sustainability: Coffee and Produce

If you haven't had the chance to visit the Pawtucket/ Wintertime Farmers Market, I highly encourage you to check it out! It's filled with vendors dedicated to providing their communities with the highest quality and freshest products while remaining committed to sustainable practices.

New Harvest Coffee Roasters

Some of the best coffee in RI can be found right at the Pawtucket Farmer’s Market. New Harvest Coffee Roasters is dedicated to providing the highest quality coffee while practicing sustainable efforts. The entire coffee process from growing to harvesting to processing and roasting and ultimately brewing is acutely monitored with passion. What I found unique about New Harvest is their Source Direct program. They traveled to farms in Central and South America to connect directly with small farms producing coffee with greener efforts. This not only ensures a strong lasting relationship with farmers but also supports farmers taking good care of their land and paying their workers well. The strong relationship also ensures the highest quality for New Harvest’s expectations while benefitting coffee-growing communities at large.

Overall I learned there’s nothing easy about great coffee but New Harvest strives to provide the best and really takes each stage of the process a step further. If you can’t make it to the Farmer’s Market to try their coffee stop by their home Hope Artiste Village or look for their coffee supplied in cafés, restaurants, bakeries, groceries and households in all 50 states.

Freedom Food Farm

Freedom Food Farm was one of the many local farms at the market. Their mission is to provide healthy, nutritious food to members of the community throughout the socioeconomic spectrum. All of their produce, eggs, pork, and chickens are grown and raised with exclusively organic and biodynamic principles; their efforts are to mock a natural ecological cycle. All their hard work is just to provide healthy food for the community while reducing their foot print! I loved how they go beyond certified organic allowances. Even if it’s allowed they vow to never spray chemicals or pesticides on their fields and crops. They have endless practices with the compost and animal rotation to have the entire farm working as a natural ecosystem. Freedom Food Farm is a prime example of farming sustainable not just to provide healthy safe food to the community but to also preserve the farmland for future generation.

Freedom Food Farm was very knowledgeable about where they grow and raise their food and how it’s treated to arrive at the end results. I encourage you to buy local and direct from farmers with attempts to enhance food production overall, it will create a healthier world and a healthier you!

Learn more about sustainable practices as we head to Costa Rica! You can also follow us on Twitter! @BryantMKT421

-Krysia Syska

Herbs & Ice Cream

Before traveling to Costa Rica to discover the sustainable practices that are implemented in another country, we explored our own area to get a sense of sustainability and to see what some of the members within our own community do in order to be environmentally friendly. 

We followed the painted tomato signs through the
maze of hallways to discover even more vendors!

The Pawtucket Wintertime Farmers Market located in the Hope Artiste Village provides local grounds for community members and merchants alike to exchange goods. 

The majority of the vendors supply organic or homegrown produce and other goods. While all the sellers expressed an interest in environmental health and lessening their carbon footprint, there were two in particular that exuded an incredible passion for their companies and the goods and services that they provide.

Situated on a five acre farm in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, Farmacy Herbs Community Health and Education Center offers herbs and consultation for natural remedies. They have a large selection of bulk dried herbs, local honey, books, herbal blends, and herbal products, including small simple items, such as lip balms, and infused oils containing plant extracts for wellness and relief. They also offer a wide variety of tea blends, including custom blends that can be made for specific tastes or uses based on the main ingredients. Additonally, Farmacy Herbs has a classroom space to host classes and training sessions to educate interested individuals on the use and practice of natural medicine. Not only does Farmacy Herbs use organic ingredients and products, but they encourage the sustainability of life through general health and wellness by offering goods that are wholesome for the mind and body.

Tricycle Ice Cream is another independent vendor that follows environmentally friendly business practices by offering ice cream on a tricycle! This extremely unique business uses the energy generated directly by man to power through Providence and the roads of Rhode Island, reducing emissions and pollution into the air unlike a typical delivery vehicle. To top it all off, Tricycle Ice Cream has delicious and creative flavors that are sure to satisfy even the most insatiable sweet-tooth. 

Author: Bridgette Kosek

Follow me on Twitter! @BridgetteKosek

Stay up to date with all of our activities by following @BryantMKT421 on Twitter!

Learning New Things at the Farmer's Market

Growing up in a small town in Connecticut, I always knew that Farmer's Markets were the best place to find fresh produce, but the thought of visiting one never crossed my mind.  I never felt the need to go to a place where I believed they only sold fruits and vegetables.  As it turns out, the Farmer's Market is much more than that, and it is also quite interesting.  On December 6, I learned what a Farmer's Market actually looked like and saw the setups that people had in the Pawtucket Wintertime Farmer's Market.  

It was my first experience at a Farmer's Market, and being that it was a rainy day and we had to leave at 9:00 AM on a cold Saturday morning, I was not ready for what I envisioned the Farmer's Market to be like. However, once I was there, I was intrigued and learned a lot about the places there. 

I also learned a little bit about how the Farmer's Market works as well.  The vendors have a six month contract with the Farmer's Market, and most of them are repeat vendors. Thinking that there would be a lot of competition in such a small area, I asked if there are people here early to get prime locations or if there's ever any fighting among vendors.  To my surprise, most vendors rush in at the last minute before the market opens, not worrying much about where they are set up.  The vendors are also very friendly to each other and their customers, as they all respect the amount of work and effort that it takes to be in the farming industry.  They support each other and are even willing to occasionally help each other out.  This surprised me a little bit because they're all competitors, but at the same time it didn't based on how nice and friendly all of them were.

Seven Stars Bakery

Seven Stars Bakery is a local bakery in Rhode Island that has three restaurant-type locations.  I had visited on location once before, and due to that and the fact that it was one of the first tables, it was the first table that I stopped at.  Seven Stars has a baking facility in the building that the Farmer's Market is in, and so they take full advantage of their location by taking part.  

Seven Star's baking facility is being worked in constantly, with bread and pastries being cooked non-stop.  The reason for this is that the process to cook each of their products to perfection requires a lot of time to prepare it.  They use a unique process of long-fermentation, keeping their bread and pastries softer and more fresh for a longer period of time than competitors who produce bread quickly by shortening the fermentation process.  

Not only does Seven Stars produce quality food, but they are also focused on the community and are also focusing on becoming more environmentally friendly.  Seven Stars purchases all of their ingredients from suppliers that are as local as possible, and they rarely use suppliers that are further than Massachusetts and Connecticut.  While Seven Stars does not have set suppliers, they have a network, as they need to have a backup should a supplier be unable to deliver.  

Seven Stars also bakes more breads and pastries than they need at a given time.  This allows them to account for burnt and dropped food while not being slowed down in the process.  For all of the food that is dropped and is not any good, Seven Stars will compost it and has arrangements with a local farm to sell or trade it.  The leftover food that is still fresh gets donated to people who are struggling to provide food for themselves.  They do this to be interactive in their community as well as be environmentally friendly.  Another environmentally friendly step that they have taken is that all of the paper that they use (napkins, paper plates, etc.) are all recycled paper.  They told me that they are making an effort to become even more sustainable and environmentally friendly in the next couple of years, but it's a long and expensive process, especially considering that they do not own some of their properties but they rent them instead, meaning that they wouldn't need permission to make any large improvements to the property.

Apponagansett Farm

Apponagansett Farm is a small family farm in South Dartmouth, MA. The products that they sell are all produced with an emphasis on quality, and they also have sustainability initiatives that are in place that they use in growing their products.  The part that interested me the most was that they do not use many of the chemicals, fertilizers, and other harmful products to help produce their food.  In addition, they also feed their hens GMO-free grain so that they produce an egg with no added chemicals to it.

When we were talking about their chemical-free practices, I asked them what would happen if any of their crops failed during the season.  The first part of the response was that they grow a wide variety of crops in order to avoid any crop-failing related problems.  This way if one crop fails, there are other crops to be sold so that they don't take a loss from it.  In addition, they are part of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), which provides them a community to trade, buy, and sell products from other farms as well as sell products the the community in a certain group.  This helps them because they can work with other farms when a crop fails so that they help each other out.     

Having a supply chain concentration, it was interesting to me to see where Apponagansett Farm fell on it.  They are the producer of their own products, but they also sell their products as well.  This makes them a large part of their own supply chain without having many other players involved. The largest outside influence on their supply chain is for the equipment and the local natural food stores that sell their products. With controlling the supply chain, they are able to keep sustainability as a main goal throughout the process.  This also allows them to keep their customers informed about how their products are grown with sustainability practices and chemically free.  

Ava Anderson

As a group, a few classmates, our professors, and I stopped into a store that is in the same building as the Farmer's Market, though it is not technically a registered vendor.  We stopped at Ava Anderson, the only brand of non-toxic and organic skin care products in the United States.  Here I learned that there are only 10 banned chemicals in the United States versus 1300 in Europe.  This is an astonishing fact that makes me question how much toxins are in other products that I use daily.  The other part that I found interesting is that when "fragrance" is listed as an ingredient in a product, there are usually dangerous chemicals that do not have to be listed because of the inclusion of "fragrance" in the ingredients, which also makes me question the many products that I use.  There are also no filters to filter out toxins in our body when going from the skin into our bloodstream; the only filtration is when we ingest something.  

Learning all of this, I was intrigued as to how the business started.  Ava was only 15 years old when the company started, and it has boomed ever since.  Being the only non-toxic and organic brand in the US market, it has given her an advantage of less competition on the same level.  She also has the support of her friends and family; she credits this support as being what helped her get everything from an idea to a product.  It is a very interesting company and I learned a lot of interesting thing about skin care that I had never known before.

--Daniel DiNicola

To follow my adventures in Costa Rica, follow me on twitter @italian_dino08

To follow my class' adventures in Costa Rica, follow us on twitter @BryantMKT421 and follow our blog!

Fresh and local!

A hidden gem of Rhode Island found right in the Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket is the Wintertime Farmers Market, which we were lucky to get the chance to check out. This market is filled with local vendors from Rhode Island and the nearby Massachusetts area with hopes of selling fresh goods to

the community. The market began in Providence in 2007 with 10-12 local farmers. Since, it has moved locations in order to keep up with the growing amount of vendors hoping to sell their

products. Check out their website at: http://www.farmfresh.org/food/farmersmarkets_details.php?market=29.

I was lucky enough to get the chance to talk to a few of the vendors at their stands as I strolled through the farmers market with my delicious (and sustainable!) cup of coffee from New Harvest

Coffee Roasters located right in Hope Artiste Village.

Ward’s Berry Farm

One of the vendors, Ward’s Berry Farm located in Sharon, MA sells their farm products at the market. The farm was founded in 1982 by Brothers Jim and Bob Ward with hopes of offering the finest quality fruits and vegetables to their community. The farm currently has one retail outlet where they sell their products to the local community right in Sharon, however, they do participate in different farmers markets nearby and sell to local restaurants and businesses. In order to do this, the farm uses sustainable methods to produce their food such as working to build the health of their soil to increase its organic matter. In addition, they grow 18 acres of certified organic crops, which prohibit the use of synthetic chemicals. This farm mainly relies on word of mouth communication through the local community, Facebook and their website where they are able to highlight their sustainable practices.

Check them out at: https://www.facebook.com/wardsberryfarm

Cranberry Hill Farm

In contrast, Cranberry Hill farm located in Plymouth, MA sells one product, organic cranberries. The cranberry bog in which the cranberries are produced has been certified organic for twelve years. Like

Ward’s Berry Farm, the bog does not use synthetic chemicals because they want to not only prevent consumers from ingesting chemicals but to preserve the habitat of the wildlife within the area as well. The bog uses a recovery pond to reuse water resources making the entire process completely sustainable. From the actual farming process to the cleaning, screening and packaging of the cranberries, Cranberry Hill ensures the integrity and sustainability of the product. Unlike Ward’s Berry Farm, the farm solely relies on word of mouth communication to bring people and other local business to their farm stand in Plymouth.

Although these businesses sell different products, they follow one similar pattern: a commitment to sustainability. I believe the visit to the Wintertime Farmers Market has given us a small glimpse into the many approaches that different local businesses are using in order to promote sustainability, which gives us a basic understanding of the broader concept that we will be exploring in Costa Rica.

-Tayla Benoit (@TaylaBenoit)

Don't forget to follow us on twitter for live tweets from Costa Rica: @BryantMKT412