Earth Friendly Beer

I recently had the pleasure of sending out two crisp $50 bills to two MX employees.

The story began about a month ago. I had gone to visit Freddy Bensch of SweetWater Brewing Company in Atlanta http://www.sweetwaterbrew.com . I suspect it was not an accident that our meeting was not scheduled at breakfast. It was late in the afternoon and as we arrived the modern glass lined lobby was filling up with a few hundred attractive young Georgians drawn by the weekly happy hour! Within a few minutes I had a mug in my hand and a smile on my face.

Freddy , who calls himself the “Big Kahuna” on his business card, showed me around his spotless plant on Ottley Drive in Atlanta. I had my first taste of beer directly from the “cask” (read: 800 gallon stainless steel drum). I also had a momentary fantasy of what Lucille Ball and Ethel Mertz would have done if they were employed here but I let it pass.

We were chatting over some of his latest brew when we asked if he knew about MXenergy’s new Earth Friendly Partner program. We proceeded to describe how all of our offices had screened “Inconvenient Truth” back in November. We then resolved as a company to help our customers offset their carbon dioxide emissions: CO2, after all, is the primary cause of global warming and the average residential customer emits 5.2 tons of CO2 per year (you read that correctly: 5.2 tons!).

After some research and discussions with climate experts in London and Washington, MXenergy launched the Earth Friendly Partner program in December. Under the program, customers pay us an additional $.01 per therm of gas consumed – approximately $10 per year for the average residential customer – and we purchase certificates representing tree planting projects. The cost is actually over $.01/therm but we decided that MXenergy will make up the difference; hence the name “Earth Friendly Partner.” We and our customers will work together to offset their carbon emissions. [Note: As you may remember from your high school bio class, trees and grass lands absorb CO2 in the process of photosynthesis. For our first offsets we purchased the carbon offsets generated by two Northwestern Indian tribes. A London based company that is active in saving the rain forests around the world, Sustainable Forestry Management, provided the offsets. Below are some photos of the reserve in Montana and the greenhouse with the saplings used for the project.]

When we launched the program, we had no idea if any customers would be interested. But within a few weeks Rodger, our head of customer care, reported that 26% of all customers shown the product bought it! That’s when I called up our commercial marketing team and proposed the following one-time offer: $100 to the first person in our company to sell the Earth Friendly Partner program to a commercial customer!

Now back to SweetWater. I’d like to think it wasn’t the beer talking but we started to explain Earth Friendly to Freddy and before he had gotten the words out the Chief Kahuna said, “Where do I sign?”

Footnote: I returned home to Connecticut with a Sweetwater t-shirt for my son Marshall. The shirt shows a leaping fish being hooked on the back. Marshall wore it the next day and came home to report that he was stopped in the high school hallway by a friend whose family moved up from Atlanta recently. “Hey, Dude, good beer!” I didn’t ask Marshall what the drinking age was in Georgia but I think I know..