Sunday, February 1, 2009

Blue is the New Green

Last month I decided right before the end of the year that it was time for me to buy a Ford Escape Hybrid.  We had 40 plus inches of snow in December, I am driving back and forth in the country a lot these days to get to my whey plant, and doing this with two wheel drive was just not working.  I wanted to buy a domestic hybrid so I can be the change I want to see in the world.  The trouble was, midwest dealers didn't get many of the hybrids and I had three days left in December to get a car if I wanted to get the tax credit in 2008.  I ended up buying one in Raleigh, NC and driving it back to Wisconsin with my daughter Lex.  I had no choice what color or what features would be in the car.  It was blue.  At the time I was disappointed because I  thought I wanted a green car (green company - green car, right?) or white (whey is white - white car, right?).  

Fast forward a month and I'm in the final throes of developing our brand and product logo.  We were working with a comp that had a blueberry on it and the logo was blue.  Not just any blue but the same silvery grey blue of my car.  I thought we were going to switch out the colors with the flavors, then learned that it was in fact going to remain the same blue as my car. So I've got a blue car, a blue brand and a blue logo, and I realized last night that its only a matter of time before blue becomes the next green.  Millions of people on the planet already no longer have access to clean water.  The situation is deteriorating on every continent on the planet.  
When the world realizes that we're running out of clean water, we're going to be talking about businesses going 'blue' instead of just 'green'. My business is already a blue business, in the sense that we are implementing a tremendous amount of water recovery and reuse in our process.  So blue, it's already the new green, at least in my life and business.

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