Before I left for my Chicago trip with Tropicana, I inundated you with blog posts about my upcoming experience.  I was worried that I was spending too much time away my regular posts about cooking with children.  I hope my recent posts about my summer cooking camps for kids reminded you that I am back in action.

But before I write more about some fun food science and cooking with kids activities, I felt compelled to tell you a bit about what I learned in Chicago.  I have to say that I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t be too keen on how Tropicana ran their business, but I came away feeling pretty good about the company and their 100% juice products.

Here are a few tasty tidbits about their sustainability practices:

• They take into consideration the whole life cycle of the product, from picking the fruit to discarding the package
• Tropicana process 58 million oranges every day, during fruit season.  Of course, that lead me to ask what happens to the rinds after the fruit halves are juiced.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the peels are ground and then processed into feed for cattle.
• They have an engineer dedicated to work on improving their packaging and integrating more post consumer recycled content
• Tropicana is the first of any consumer brand in N America to have its carbon footprint evaluated.
• They are working on a carbon neutral fertilizer solution.
• They use rail cars to transport their products through the nation.  These are 3x more efficient than trucks
• Tropicana has a goal to increase the number of cities accepting cartons (which are a mixture of paper and plastic) for recycling
• Visit this link to find out if your local waste management is able to recycle cartons: http://www.werecyclecartons.com/
• Cool Earth and Tropicana have partnered on a Rainforest Rescue program: www.tropicanarainforest.com
• Help to save 100 square feet of rain forest in Peru each time you enter a unique code; 57,119,100 sq feet of rain forest have been saved
• Environmental education is provided to those communities and incentives are given to farmers to preserve the rain forest instead of using it for logging.  Local communities are now finding it more economically attractive to hold the land and keep it viable.

When I asked Tropicana executives why they were working to preserve habitat in another country instead of closer to home, they said that for the money, they could make a bigger difference in Central/South America.  They also pointed out that the rain forest is an amazing natural resource that can help absorb Carbon Dioxide and prevent global warming.

I busted their chops about a few other issues as well.  And while one of their nutritionists acted a bit defensive, everyone else handled my questions with grace.  They even took to heart one of my comments, and at breakfast the following morning, they served water in pitchers instead of only in plastic bottles.

Overall, I had a fantastic experience, met some wonderful bloggers and learned a lot about the efforts that Tropicana is making to move their business in a sustainable direction.  And of course, I appreciate that they selected me to participate in this experience and hope that they learned from me, as I did from them.