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Grandcruwijnen operates sustainable

Sustainability starts in our own hands

Grandcruwijnen is an online and physical wine shop with one of the largest ranges of quality wines in the Netherlands. We carry more than 2500 products of (internationally) renowned wines from all well-known wine countries.

At Grandcruwijnen, we consider sustainability to be of paramount importance and we try to make a serious contribution to its genda within our capabilities. These are no words without meaning, but we do this in a concrete and demonstrable way. Three very relevant sustainable investments that we make are

 

  • Climate-compensated free shipping
  • CO2-neutral conditioning
  • No plastics, but recycled cardboard for packaging material

 

Climate-compensated shipping

Sustainability is an important part of our policy and our vision. We have been able to quickly make a huge positive impact on the environment through carbon offset in our deliveries.

We offer the option to have your parcels delivered in the evening (between 17:00 and 22:00 o'clock) and this is climate-compensated. All of our outgoing deliveries are CO2 / carbon offset at no additional cost to you.

The evening delivery is without a doubt the most preferred shipping method for our customers. With live map tracking and the possibility to determine when your package will be delivered, so that the success rate of the first time delivered right is well above 90%.

All this makes a serious difference in the transport movements and also just to forget it is better for your beautiful wines. The wines are transported at night from our conditioned warehouse via a conditioned truck to an equally conditioned distribution warehouse of Budbee and are then delivered to you the following evening — short lead time, no back-and-forth with your fine wines, no transport during the day, overheated vans, no unnecessarily long trips because driving outside the hustle and bustle.

The delivery is done by Budbee and they have offset the emissions from the entire distribution and other parts in the operation. Carbon offsetting is a process of offsetting carbon emissions through investment in verified projects leading to emission reductions around the world through ZeroMission rainforest projects including Uganda and Nicaragua. You can learn more about this on Budbee's website.

These projects have a serious and direct positive economic and social impact in the developing country where the project is located. One ton of carbon offset limited the reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide.

 

Conditioning CO2-neutrally

Online stores can often describe and recommend very well how beautiful wines should be consumed, stored and shipped. Wine is a natural product and, regardless of the price of the wine, should be stored in an environment where there is a constant, not too high, temperature. Harmful UV light must also be avoided.

These are 2 very important elements that have a major influence on the quality where this is not a binary process. In other words due to sunlight or constant temperature fluctuations, a wine sometimes deteriorates a bit or it is consumed much earlier than desired and has a shorter storage potential, to name a few examples.

We have fully conditioned our wine warehouse so that all our wines in store and in the warehouse, regardless of the season, are kept at a constant temperature. We have also solved the effect of harmful UV light for the wines by using LED lighting. To do this sustainably, we have fitted our roof fully with solar panels and our climate system is equipped with heat pumps so they can cool and heat.

At the moment this has been thought out in such a way that we can condition our building completely CO2-neutrally. The decision to ship in 24 hours is also a conscious and natural because you as a consumer want it, but also because you want to minimize the transport time.

 

No plastics, but recycled cardboard for packaging material

A lot of packaging material is used for sending wine, such as plastics, metal boxes, wood and the like. This often happens even more with the more expensive wines, because damage to a label, for example, can already have a serious impact.

The interesting thing is that the wine world has a serious inbound and outbound flow of cardboard, and certainly the wine webshops that deliver to the consumer because in almost all cases repackaging has to be done.

Our latest innovation is that we reuse our cardboard and turn it into packaging material. We use a large shredder to make paper mats from cardboard boxes. We roll a bottle into it so that it is protected all around. These mats can easily be thrown by the consumer with the waste paper so that this entire flow is 100% circular.

In order to have enough cardboard to make mats, we approached our neighbors on the industrial estate and they also collect their many cardboard for us so that we can also reuse it as packaging material.

The knife cuts both ways here, because we reuse all the incoming cardboard. As a result, we do not have to buy unnecessary packaging material and we no longer have to use plastics or shells. Finally, we also ensure direct recycling at other companies, by importing cardboard from them.

Click here to watch a short video on how we reuse cardboard!

We strongly believe that consumers, and certainly our consumer profiles, also value more than just pricing. Sometimes you also have to believe in business, have ideals and not just wait for a government to prescribe or subsidize things, and as entrepreneurs we must also take our own (social) responsibility.

Grandcruwijnen attaches great value to sustainable entrepreneurship and tries to promote sustainable ways of working.

Perhaps also a consideration in the choice of your wine supplier.