The Green Festival, an annual celebration of better, healthy living, comes around to about five different cities in the year, and November is San Francisco’s date. Scheduled at the Cow Palace, the famous San Francisco event arena in
Daly City, the 2015 Green Festival enjoyed great weather, a more than big-enough venue facility for the event, and plenty of interested visitors looking to get ideas about sustainable living.
Holding the title as the nation’s largest and longest-running green living expo event, the Green Festival is designed to connect new companies, startup accelerators, local businesses, politics and communities together in a few days around the topic of better living. And there’s a little bit for everyone, from toys for the kids to books and deep-thinking products for the most ardent of social types, and then there’s plenty of tasty food for everyone in between.
Once inside the event, the Festival is half presentations on topics ranging from the food industry to sustainability in the music industry and half vendor booths and displays of goods and services. Now just about every convention or expo one goes to, there’s going to be a good number of businesses who latch onto a theme and try to sell their package; you see the same outfit at home improvement shows, green living shows, business to business shows and more. However, if one looks closely moving through the vendor booths, the Green Festival has some really interesting ideas this year.
Let's Talk About Issues
For the social-minded, a number of organizations were present as well for education and recruiting members. These included the Sierra Club, the California Clean Money Campaign pushing for passage of AB 700, the Food Integrity Campaign promoting better food product accountability, and the Milo Foundation with some really cute dogs and cats needing adoption and homes. One of the more interesting topics as well from the presenters included the poultry industry presentation by Hope Bohanec from United Poultry Concerns, covering the difference between free-range and organic poultry versus traditional chicken product manufacturing. And Clean Tech Open was present, informing folks about their startup accelerator platform and recruiting for experts to help.
Highlighted in the Festival’s advertising was the Stromer Mountain Bike. This futuristic bike has a built in electric motor which generates energy as the user pedals. The motor then kicks in, extending the range and distance capable with the bike. It’s a particularly useful model in cities with heavy bike commuting such as San Francisco and Sacramento. Currently distributed by New Wheel in San Francisco, the Stromer is in the higher range of bicycle costs, but they are working on developing additional models for a wider market. And the car industry was represented by two electric car displays from Audi and Volkswagen specifically.
Local non-profit and government agencies were also present at the Festival as well, including the Norther CA Recycling Association and the San Mateo County Environmental Health office with plenty of handouts and literature about their programs.
Interesting Food Samples
Mixing among the people, Clif Protein Bar volunteers were handing out samples of their certifiably organic food bars. The cranberry almond bar looked promising but the dark chocolate peanut butter bar was a favorite by comparison. The Larabar Fruit & Nut Food Bar didn’t go over so well with the kids who were eager to sample.
Also on the food front notables was Manini’s, a pasta and bread food company with a focus on gluten-free foods. The bread was light but had a nice taste of virgin oil on the bottom, and the pasta samples had you looking for more. And Pamela’s Products had a handy thanksgiving recipe brochure just in time for the holidays with some interest mixtures of their products and traditional Thanksgiving dishes, convincing folks to try out a few this holiday as well.
GrubMarket was another standout. This business is designed to deliver fresh fruits and vegetables to your home or office three times a week in the six Bay Area counties. Outside that area the product would have to be shipped by courier right now, but they are looking to expand in the future. The baby tomatoes were particularly tasty and snappy in their sample.
FreshAlley was another offering with a similar concept for fresh vegetable and fruit delivery as well.
Hey, That's a Good Idea!
On the better living side of things, as soon as you could tear yourself away from the delicious tomato and cheese samples next to the cooking show and the bean and rice chips (need more of those, please), there were a number of companies with interesting products for living just a little bit different. One item which works extremely well for urban living was the Garden Gal Tower. This plant incubating tower they’ve designed is able to hold multiple plants, grow them with the same watering system, recycle the excess and use extremely little space and no dirt or soil mess. It’s an amazingly simple but useful gardening tool for those who living in condominiums or don’t want to hassle with traditional dirt planting.
Other services included Carzac, an app service similar to Uber and Lyft but focused specifically on commuters who want to carpool. The service coordinates riders with drivers willing to take multiple passengers in carpools to the same destination regularly. Everyone gets a ride, the earth receives less auto pollution, and there’s less cars on the road for traffic. Smart.
And for those who are thinking about the afterlife and don’t want to have a big carbon footprint left behind, there’s a Greener Funeral, which sells woven basket funeral caskets designed to break down faster than traditional caskets in terms of better environmental sustainability and green living.
On the furniture side, Mendocino Heritage Furniture Company had some really nice hand-crafted wood furniture with beautiful and rich dark colors, a rarity in West Coast wood furniture. Most times people have to settle or light oak, which is the far more common choice available.
Even the Kids Like It
Walking out with samples of hemp heart salad sprinkling and Better off Red tea bags and a copy of Epoch Times newspaper, visitors at this year’s Green Festival will have found at least a handful of ideas, good food, and products that can be useful. And even on leaving, one might have heard an amazing statement of one mother telling another, “Seriously, the kids really wanted to come to this, I’m not kidding you!” If not that, the tympanic music by Charles Xavier was an eye and ear-catcher as well.
