Courtesy Outpost Natural Foods
Outpost Natural Foods team receiving the 2019 Green Master Award from the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council. Pictured L to R: Mary Abel, Kurt Baehmann, Margaret Mittelstadt, Pam Mehnert.
Outpost Natural Foods opened 50 years ago as part of the first Earth Day celebration. Every April 22 since 1970, Earth Day marks the birth of the modern environmental movement. The Climate Collaborative honored the cooperative grocery chain with a 2020 Outstanding Company Award, which identifies and celebrates trailblazers in the natural products industry demonstrating strong, inspiring climate leadership.
“We believe climate change is real and plastic convenience is poisoning our planet with a waste stream that’s close to irreversible - like we’ve never seen before. It’s having a negative impact on our community, our food supply, and the livelihood of all of us,” says Outpost General Manager Pam Mehnert. “We’re committed to reversing that impact and to lead by example. Our mission to create healthy, diverse, and sustainable communities is stronger than the competitive forces around us. We’re here to change the world, just like our founders did 50 years ago when they opened our co-op as part of the country’s first Earth Day celebration.”
Outpost, one of the largest retail food cooperatives in the US with four Milwaukee-area locations, was recognized for bold actions it’s taken to address climate change and pollution. This past year the co-op was the first multi-store Milwaukee grocer to switch from plastic produce bags to an innovative compostable version, one of many ways Outpost is working toward its goal to eliminate petroleum-based plastic co-op packaging and consumables by 2022.
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“Doing the right thing isn’t always the easiest thing,” says Kurt Baehmann, Outpost Sustainability Manager. “There’s a lot of appreciation among shoppers for our efforts to live up to our values, but change can be difficult and we’re working diligently to encourage and support sustainable consumer choices.”
Some of that encouragement offered includes new kiosks in each store to educate produce shoppers about going plastic-free by distributing a brochure, “How to Give Plastic the Boot for Your Veggies and Fruit.” Outpost is also phasing out inventory of water packaged in single use petroleum-based plastic bottles, switching instead to glass, aluminum and boxed packaging options made from recycled paper and other renewable materials including sugarcane.
Outpost has replaced plastic containers for hot food and salad bars to ones made from 100 percent recycled paper. They’ve also switched to compostable plastic straws and EcoTaster sampling spoons and replaced petroleum-based Styrofoam with compostable foam trays in meat packaging. The co-op has established single areas in each store where shoppers can find a variety of reusable container options to use at home including water bottles, sandwich and snack bags, straws, baking dish covers, mason jars, beeswax wraps and more. For those shoppers pursuing more sustainable forms of transportation, Outpost installed electric vehicle charging stations at all locations which provided more than 2,300 charging sessions in 2019.
A committed green power user, Outpost offsets more than 100 percent of its store electricity use. The co-op has made the EPA Green Power Partnership Top 30 Retail list for five consecutive years and counting for its purchase of Renewable Energy Credits benefiting projects in this region. A 56KwH solar panel array at Outpost’s Mequon store, where it owns the building, generates enough electricity annually to power four households.
Courtesy Outpost Natural Foods
Additionally, in 2019 Outpost diverted 18,000 gallons of wastewater to flush toilets, composted more than 416,000 pounds of food scraps, and recycled 648,000 pounds of cardboard.
“We’re proud to be recognized both nationally and locally for our environmental stewardship. We have always been pioneers, and at many times in our past, we waited for the world to catch up with us. This clearly is another one of those times,” says Mehnert. “But we have to do business differently. We have to shop differently. We need to be the change we want to see in the world.”
