The Hanover Co-op and Pete & Gerry’s Organic eggs are offering some contrarian advice: Please consider putting all your eggs in one basket — for the sake of the environment.
The food market and Grafton County organic egg distributor have launched a pilot program to introduce reusable egg cartons at the Co-op’s stores to reduce the use of plastic egg cartons. Like reusable shopping bags, reusable egg cartons are meant to foster sustainability and decrease relying upon packaging materials that require large amounts of fossil fuels to make.
Customers have long scratched their heads over why Pete & Gerry’s, which is based on Monroe, N.H., but whose executive office is now at the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center at Centerra Park in Lebanon and prides itself on its treatment of hens (although PETA is challenging those claims), uses plastic egg cartons as opposed to paper cartons.
But P&G maintains that research has shown that, contrary as it sounds, recycled plastic is more environmentally-friendly because the process in making eggs cartons from recycled plastic results in less of a carbon footprint than the process involved with making molded fiber cartons.
Now P&G wants to go to the next step from recycling to reuse in its packaging materials, said Paul Turbeville, vice president of marketing at the company.
“We’ve been using the plastic carton for 20 years, and it does have a real advantage over fiber pulp. But we’re very focused on sustainability and ask ourselves how do we do better than we are currently,” he said. “We felt good on the recycling front but said let’s try to move (our efforts) up a bit to reuse.”
The reusable plastic egg cartons — made out of recycled plastic from a supplier in Michigan — look like a typical opaque white egg carton and are displayed next to the loose eggs in an open refrigerated case at the Hanover Co-op markets in Lebanon, Hanover and White River Junction.
A reusable egg container costs $2.99, but buyers are given 50 cents off each purchase of a dozen eggs, so the containers pay for themselves after six refills. Based on the average person’s consumption of 279 eggs per year, that’s the equivalent of 23 recycled plastic egg cartons annually.
The reusable egg cartons were introduced without fanfare five weeks ago, and as of last week, the co-op stores had sold 208 reusable containers and 269 dozen eggs. To put that in perspective, over the past 90 days, the co-op store in Lebanon has sold 1,623 dozen P&G’s large brown organic eggs and the Hanover store has sold 1,811 dozen (figures for the White River Junction store were not available).
“Sales of Pete and Gerry’s regular carton eggs have stayed steady, but that quick uptick in sales of reusable cartons and repeat sales of 269 dozen loose is an impressive launch without advertising by any standard,” co-op spokesman Allan Reetz said via email.
Changing lifetime consumer habits from purchasing eggs already packed in a container to getting people to select loose eggs from trays and put them by hand in a reusable container might be a challenge, but markets have already seen a gradual rise in the use of reusable shopping bags.
“The early adopters will be more natural food stores but we’ve already had some mainstream retailers reach out to our sales team,” Turbeville said. “We’re hoping we can make a dent in the way eggs are purchased nationally.”
It’s a big step up for My Brigadeiro, both figuratively and literally.
The little Hanover shop known for its hand-crafted chocolate treats, cakes and cupcakes is moving out of its basement location below Citizens Bank and across the street into storefront space that was formerly part of the Dartmouth Bookstore.
Of course, negotiating the stone steps into the basement-level shop has hardly deterred anyone craving chocolatier Ana Paula Fernandes’ bite-size orbs filled with fruit flavors and rolled in nuts and sprinklings. But a shop door at street level is sure to boost customer traffic coming through the door.
Brigadeiros — the name is derived from a mid-20th century Brazilian military officer whose political campaign was financed by the sale of the homemade chocolate treats — are a traditional dessert in Fernandes’ native Brazil that resemble the truffle.
“Initially this space was way too big for us but we’ve outgrown it,” said Fernandes, who opened her chocolate shop in the basement level at 44 S. Main St. in 2014 after running it out of her home in Norwich for the previous two years. “We’re established in town now but a lot of new customers still don’t know we exist due to the fact we’re underneath the building,” she said.
Beginning with chocolates, Fernandes has broadened her dessert menu to include lush layer cakes, gourmet cupcakes, pinafores, cookies, peanut brittle and “pastry bombs.”
“We felt the necessity of developing a pastry line and that had really exploded,” she said.
Fernandes sees the move as the first step in expanding her business’ footprint in New England. She hopes to open more My Brigadeiro store locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
“In the next two to three years, we will be branching out,” she said.
The store’s move, which Fernandes expects to happen in March, is made easier by the fact that Hanover commercial property owner Jay Campion owns both buildings. Initially the space had been slated for an apparel store but the intended tenant cited delays in the renovation project of the building in abandoning the plan.
My Brigadeiro is not the only Hanover retail store to be moving across the street. AmComm Wireless’ Verizon cellphone store on South Street will relocate in March into the South Main Street corner space formerly occupied by Zimmermanns The North Face, which closed in June. Signs are already up trumpeting the pending move … David Calhoun, the former General Electric executive who has a home in Sunapee,is unlikely to get as much time to enjoy life by the lake as he had been hoping when he purchased the lakeside home from former Dartmouth College President Jim Wright and his wife, Susan, in 2006. Calhoun, 62, last week was named chief executive of troubled aviation company Boeing, maker of the 737 Max jet which has been suspended from service until regulators are satisfied Boeing has resolved technical problems that have been blamed in two crashes of the jet that killed hundreds of passengers. Calhoun, who previously lived in New Canaan, Conn., and had run GE’s jet engine business, described his Sunapee home as now his “primary residence.”
Contact me at jlippman@vnews.com.
