Tang’s electric cargo bike arrives!
Our electric cargo bike has arrived.
A big step forward in our effort to get our direct emissions as low as possible and it’s equipped with some EXTREMELY witty messaging to say as much!
The focus for us now will be to use the momentum generated from this bike (pun) to reduce our emissions as far as we can. Get as much of our production for all of our cafes into our production kitchen at Lower Abbey Street, your marinades, hummus, tzatziki, salsas, shakshuka as well as all our baking, Tang nut butter and granola, house pressed juices and kombuchas and so on and so forth. All items that there is zero sacrifice on quality by being made centrally but improvements in environmental impact.
During lockdown earlier this year we monitored our daily delivery numbers into each of our cafes, our electricity consumption per € of sales in each location and our daily waste output broken down into general waste, recyclable and organic / compost - that’ll be worth a blog post of it’s own actually - but just to say one of the big focuses of our central kitchen is to help us live within the principles of Doughnut Economics and improve on all these metrics and not just our profit line.
Things like getting nuts, rice and other grain, oats and spices delivered centrally in 25 - 50kg paper bags and distributing them throughout our cafes by cargo bike means only 1 van delivering into us maybe once every other week in this example and then it’s a cargo bike delivering within our network for the remainder of the time! It also cuts out a lot of unnecessary packaging and means we can spend out time burning Aubergines rather then fossil fuels!
Same principle for all our bulk orders of cleaning products from Lily’s Eco Clean - one delivery once every few months of 50L of each cleaning product and then refill centrally and distribute. Zero plastic cleaning products.
Bulk orders like these just wouldn’t have been possible in our Dawson St location for obvious reasons and so centralising things was always part of the plan for us to help support our Dawson location in particular.
So for this reason a mode of transport was always going to be necessary and we are absolutely delighted to be in a position to be a small part of the solution to better air quality in this city and lower carbon emissions on this planet, and hopefully we’ll see many more businesses following suit over the coming months and years.
If you are a business considering purchasing a cargo bike we can confirm that they beat a van hands down whatever way you look at it!
Just in pure monetary terms
no tax
circa €300 to get it added to our business insurance
no parking costs
no fuel
Which is a combined annual saving of quite a bit.
In operational terms
significantly less traffic, quicker deliveries
reduced labour costs as we’re not paying someone to sit in traffic
better working conditions for staff, nothing worse than sitting in traffic when you’re busy as we tend to be
can pull up at the front door for loading and unloading
electric so a pleasure to cycle
In environmental & societal terms
No impact on air quality in the city
almost zero carbon emissions
No noise pollution
Not contributing to congestion in the city
Helping lead the way on a new way of planning a city that doesn’t revolve around the motor car and instead revolves around people!
We bought our bike from the guys at Greenaer on Pearse Street and you couldn’t fault the service - very happy to recommend them.
We’ll keep working on how to push this further and hope to update you with a further blog post soon.