Charlottesville Downtown Mall At Night

As CTO, I seem to be getting the recurring question, “Can you (hotelicopter) find the tech-savvy talent you need in Charlottesville?”  It’s a valid question.  Long gone are the days of Kesmai, EA, Mr. Goodbucks, and the beloved Value America.  These days, we have influx of spooks, a smattering of biotech companies, and in the IT/Internet world… a whole buncha nothin’.

Usually I give a good new / bad news kind of answer to this question.  I’ll run through the good part first so we can get to the juicy bad part.

The good news is that you can do alot more cool stuff with a whole lot fewer people than you used to.  And even though we’ll be quintupling the size of the tech staff at hotelicopter, in absolute numbers, it’s still a very small number of people.  Armed with the right package of cash compensation, equity, benefits, a really cool place to work, and seriously fun stuff to work on, I’m very confident we can find the team we want.

The bad news, though, is that once we’re done cherry picking the local talent, all that’s left will be tumbleweeds.  (And bookstores and coffee shops.)

I recently had it put to me that Charlottesville stands at a crossroads.  On the one side, the ‘Ville could evolve into the next Austin.  You know, the cool Austin: vibrant arts and music scene, burgeoning tech mecca, nifty atmosphere, lots of fusion restaurants.  Sounds pretty good to me.

Or… Our beloved city could turn into Aspen.  You know, frigid Aspen.  The Aspen where private jets land to deliver out of towners and transplants to their ostentatious homes, and everyone who actually works lives… somewhere else.  Somewhere cheaper.  Like Waynesboro, Nelson County, Greene and Orange.  Let’s face it, Charlottesville’s already looking alot more like Aspen than Austin.  We have a sharp housing gap (the current downturn in home prices not withstanding), a widening income gulf, and with each passing decade, a sharp decline in local industry… of any kind.  At the current pace we’ll be left with just fancy restaurants, coffee shops and riding tack boutiques.

Aspen… Great place if you can afford it.

As reported in the inestimable International Herald Tribune (a good non-US perspective I like to keep tabs on), global food reserves are running low.  The green revolution not withstanding, the news troubles me.  Throw in global warming, the moves by multinational agri-conglomerates like ADM and Montsanto (in the US, this translates to the farm bill and NAIS), and the news seems even more ominous.

When we tell people about our business (Perfect Flavor), we tell them that our goal is sustainability. In its simplest definition, sustainability refers to the long-term longevity of a human enterprise. Sustainability encompasses several overlapping concerns: the environment, social systems, and economic systems. One widely employed definition states that sustainable development:

“meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

With respect to the environment, one definition of sustainability means that all of the things a business takes from the Earth – the inputs like energy, fuel, and raw materials – must eventually be returned to the Earth in such a way that they can be used again.

We, like others involved with sustainable businesses, struggle with these definitions and labels. Although the terminology provides context, it can be confusing and limiting. In part, the problem lies with its Platonic “either/or” duality. We find it more useful and practical to consider things along a continuum from “less sustainable” to “more sustainable”.

The problem gets even more complex, because even the idealized notion of sustainability changes over time. Sustainability isn’t a place – it isn’t a singular and fixed destination. Like us, it evolves, as our understanding of the planet Earth and our species’ place thereon evolves. Sustainability is a process – a point of view that demands thinking, exploring, and questioning the status quo.

In that spirit, and encouraged by the notion that transparency matters, we offer a list of things we know that Perfect Flavor can improve upon. We hope that this disclosure will help our customers understand what we do, and the challenges we face. On some issues, we have had little or no choice on how to proceed because regulatory requirements are very stringent. On other issues, we have chosen to compromise because we are a small Mom & Pop business, and have insufficient capital to pursue other options.

Startup

• Building Materials: We used commonly-available materials, including concrete, pine stud framing, wallboard and so on. The Commonwealth of Virginia and federal requirements on Dairy Processing Facilities dictate many of these choices, particularly in the rooms used for the actual making of ice cream.
• Furnishings And Equipment: Our pasteurizer, batch freezer, coolers and freezers are all industry standard units. Again, due to regulatory requirements and a dearth of sustainably-manufactured units that meet those compliance criteria, we have no other choices at this time.

Ongoing

• Electricity:We strongly considered the possibility of using active-solar technology to meet some of the electrical demands of the Perfect Flavor Kitchen, but due to the startup costs, we can’t afford to do so at this time. Although we’d like to buy green power, Dominion Virginia Power does not offer any, and PEPCO, which offers a green power product to residential customers in Dominion’s service area, doesn’t do so for commercial accounts. Our only option is to purchase carbon offset credits.
• Water: The Perfect Flavor Kitchen has moderate water demands, and we are currently using water and sewer services provided by the City of Waynesboro. In the upcoming year, we will explore using rainwater harvesting for flushing the toilet at our facility.
• Transportation:Currently, all of our packaging and other raw materials come and go from the Perfect Flavor Kitchen on automobiles, using standard gasoline or diesel fuel. In the future, we hope to be able to use a more sustainable alternative, such as a bio-diesel or electric-powered delivery vehicle.

When we look at this list, we feel challenged to improve the myriad ways our business impacts the environment. The stark nature of this list illustrates just how far we are from our goal, but it heartens us to pursue the dream with passion.

The Bush administration’s lastest ill conceived food policies hasten the race to the bottom in the industrial food business. What can you do? Know what you’re eating, where it comes from, what’s in it, and how it got to your table. Sounds hard? It’s not. Go to your local farmer’s market, and when you buy, ask “Did you grow this? How?”

Try it. You’ll like it.

Once again from the good folks at Worldchanging:

No Sweat Apparel, a Boston-based start-up committed to producing sweatshop-free, 100% union-made apparel. No Sweat bills itself as the first “open source” apparel manufacturer, meaning that they openly expose and share what’s behind their product, and they invite cooperation in keeping the sources open and improving the inner-workings of those sources, to produce a better end result.

The food and clothing industries need to adopt many of the same strategies towards true transparency: disclosing origins, contents, and sourcing policies.

Use Community: Smaller Footprints, Cooler Stuff and More Cash is another great post from worldchanging:

Like many people, I want less clutter and hassle in my life. I already have too much stuff I have to store, too many things I have to maintain and keep track of… …these things take up much of the time, energy and money I might otherwise apply to having the experiences I want in my life. I want an institutional tool for owning less and doing more.

What if we, as a species, were about to pitch off the edge of our ecological and evolutionary cliff?  What if all the signs were there, but we were just too muddleheaded to see them? What if the bees are smarter than we are?

Profound climate change. Depressing.

At Perfect Flavor, we are trying to build a sustainable business. We make organic ice cream. We make ice cream from local ingredients. We’re paying a living wage to our employees, and providing health care benefits for part-timers. But, this is absolutely brand new ground for me, and for Lynsie – not only in the sense of starting a new business, which is always a leap into the unknown – but even moreso because of our committment to making this a green business.

One aspect of the business Lynsie has spent alot of time on is developing our packaging to be environmentally friendly. We’ve looked hard at using PLA, a new plastic-like substance that’s made from corn and which is biodegradable. For anyone else out there walking the same path, check out this article at WorldChanging.

I’d really like to see some decent rankings for Perfect Flavor for a few choice keywords like “ice cream”, “organic ice cream”, “gourmet ice cream”, “ice cream club”, and more. I’ve brainstormed up a list of about 50 or so keywords and keyword phrases. I’m brand new to the SEO game, so it’s a bit of an uphill climb. I’m using wordtracker and googlerankings.com to help.

In the meantime, last night I tried some of Lynsie’s awesome peach sorbet. God, it’s so damn good. It tastes like a recipe for cold, refreshing summertime goodness.

Ice cream question of the day: What’s the difference between sorbet and sherbet?

Answer: Sherbet has dairy. Sorbet is just ice.