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Arcadia

Just Salad Partners With Arcadia to Offer Renewable Energy Deals, Free Salad

Always a trailblazer when it comes to sustainability, fast-casual chain Just Salad has unveiled yet another way to motivate consumers towards more eco-conscious choices: reward them with free food when they power their homes with clean energy.

The company has teamed up with clean energy startup Arcadia. Per an announcement from the two sent out today, Just Salad customers that sign up for an Arcadia subscription by the end of this month will receive a $50 credit to Just Salad. 

Arcadia stands out in the clean energy space because the company makes it possible for pretty much anyone to connect to renewable energy. By partnering with wind and solar farms around the U.S., Arcadia can source, verify, purchase, and retire renewable energy certificates (RECs) for energy consumers use at home — whether they own the house or rent an apartment. Purchasing RECs, which is essentially what Arcadia customers are doing when they connect their utility bills to the service, means contributing to the overall availability of green power across the country.

Arcadia operates across all 50 U.S. states, though availability varies within each state and isn’t everywhere.

Through the new deal, customers with a Just Salad account can sign up for an Arcadia subscription. Upon paying their power bill through the Arcadia platform, users will earn their Just Salad credit, which will be available digitally via the restaurant chain’s app. In some states, like “most of” New York and Illinois, the $5/month Arcadia membership fee can be waived. 

And while free salad is always a plus, the more important point of the Arcadia deal is that it potentially exposes more consumers to clean energy options they may previously not have known about. Just Salad’s geographic reach has grown substantially in recent years to include various states from New York to Illinois and down south to Florida and North Carolina. Arcadia operates in all of those places currently.

Encouraging and incentivizing customers to adopt more eco-friendly lives is something Just Salad’s been doing ever since it introduced its reusable bowl program, which offers customers deals and free toppings for bringing their Reusable Just Salad bowls to the store.

Arcadia, meanwhile, has partnered with food companies before, most notably in its deal with Freight Farms, struck last year, that allows CEA growers to connect their farms to cleaner sources of energy.

Freight Farms Partners With Arcadia to Provide Growers With Clean Energy Options

Freight Farms announced today it has partnered with clean energy service Arcadia to offer growers a way to connect their farms to cleaner sources of energy. The new program, available to all Freight Farms customers in the U.S., will let growers synch their utility to one of Arcadia’s wind or solar farms, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Arcadia will then match 100 percent of the farm’s electrical consumption with solar and wind energy.

Freight Farms helped to popularize the concept of turning old shipping containers into vertical farms that grow produce like leafy greens, herbs, and tomatoes. The farms, of course, require electricity to function, since most controlled-environment farms rely on LEDs as their plants’ light source and need additional energy for temperature control and dehumidifying. There isn’t a lot of public data yet on how much power these farms use, which in turn has led to a lot of questions in the last couple years around how energy efficient they actually are. 

While they’re not giving away any hard numbers on energy consumption, Freight Farms and Arcadia claim their new partnership can connect growers to cleaner forms of energy, including wind and solar, and potentially reduce their energy costs. The program builds on Arcadia’s existing subscription model, where users pay a flat monthly fee to connect their utility to Arcadia’s clean energy sources.  

Once a Freight Farm is connected, Arcadia will match 100 percent of its electricity generated by purchasing the equivalent amount of wind and solar energy in the form of Renewable Energy Certificates. Growers may, based on their location in the U.S., also be able to cut down on energy costs.

There are two options for membership, based on a farm’s location. Growers located in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, and Maine can sign up and access the community solar power market. Those in other states sign up for $5/month to access cleaner energy, according to today’s press release. 

Arcadia’s systems automate everything, so signing up for the program doesn’t require any extra steps on the part of the grower. 

Since the program is brand new, it’s difficult to say exactly how much energy is saved through it or what the actual cost savings for individual farmers are. Freight Farms said today only that the program “reduces Freight Farmers’ carbon footprint to one-quarter of industrial farming operations.”