QSR Interview | By Sherri Daye Scott
Once you decided to take the notion of running a green restaurant into your building specs, how did you find the suppliers you needed?
Gordon: You know, you just really sit online. I contacted the U.S. Green Building Council. They have contact information for the suppliers listed on their Web site. Still not everyone we use is a member. For some of the members, distribution is a major problem because you have a lot of small companies.
It’s just a time thing. Every day you get new magazines, get new articles, and you put the pieces of the puzzle together. I just got back from the Chicago Greenbuild International Conference and found the last couple of resources that are local. It’s really my passion, my hobby almost.
Pizza Fusion is in expansion mode. Won’t the lack of distribution you mentioned slow that growth?
Gordon: No. What we’ve done to be even greener is for our California stores, we found California suppliers that do salvage materials. For the Philadelphia stores and the Pittsburgh stores we have up north, we have suppliers.
Now we’re at the fortunate position where people are contacting us a lot more than we’re contacting people. We had a great piece on CNN, and, since then, we’ve had a lot of suppliers calling us and saying, “Hey, we think we can help you.”
You’ve mentioned cities on the coasts. What happens when Pizza Fusion wants to move inland, say to Kansas City? Can green suppliers still service those stores?
Gordon: There are small companies throughout the country, international even.
Durham, for example, is not too far from Atlanta, and we have suppliers for this type of material in Atlanta. So there are some things that we will ship, no doubt. But we’re very fortunate that with all our Florida stores, with all the stores we’re opening right now, we’re finding independent resources for each one, making it local building—which is a huge part of LEED. You want to try to cut down all the shipping costs. We’ve done a good job with that.
Lazar: It’s like traditional build out of a store that’s not green. You go online, you find suppliers of certain products. If there are two options available, one’s on the East Coast and one’s on the West Coast, and you’re building a store in Atlanta, it’s just practical to save by ordering and shipping from the one on the East Coast. We definitely do homework in terms of trying to find a supplier as close as possible.
A big part of the LEED certification is sourcing your materials locally so it’s a big part of our build-out.
Does each Pizza Fusion unit have the same standard green specs?
Gordon: Yes. All the drywall we use is post-consumer drywall, 100 percent recycled. The paint we use is a no-VOC [volatile organic compounds] paint. The floor we use a concrete sealant, low VOC, or and/or bamboo or cork. The tiles we use are from recycled glass bottles. All the toilets and sinks have to be low-flow. All the electricity has to be energy efficient—compact fluorescent lighting. The air conditioning has to be very efficient, about 30 percent more efficient than your standard.
These are set standards we put in our UFOC, our building code.
All the equipment is energy efficient.
Lazar: It’s all ENERGY STAR rated.
Gordon: We like to use Forest Steward Council wood, which is wood that is recirculated in a 15-year time period. And all our stores have to have a recycle department where all containers and bottles are recycled. We have a story wall explaining everything we do.