This Valentine’s Day, celebrate love in all its forms. Feeling tongue-tied? Say what you feel with gifts as delicious as the one you love.

BLOSSOMING LOVE

Celebrate the start of something beautiful with a Chinese tea bud that blooms into a magnificent flower as it steeps.

Blooming Sunrise Exhibition Flowering Tea (2 oz.) from Heavenly Tea, $12.




OH L’AMOUR

Chocolate—the universal language of love. Let Raspberry-Champagne and Burnt Caramel chocolate truffles do the talking.

Aphrodite’s Delight Valentine’s Chocolate Truffles (12 pcs.) from Socola Chocolatier, $25.




PURE DEVOTION

Since Antiquity, roses have been associated with the goddess of love. Profess your love old-school style with Rose Petal Petit Fours from one of America’s most acclaimed confectioners.

Rose Petal Petit Fours (12 pcs.) from Valerie Confections, $50.




UNCONVENTIONAL LOVE

Chocolate is the muse of this triangular truffle bar, hand-painted and infused with strawberry and orange liqueur. Delight your flame with a twist on the conventional.

Strawberry Orange Liqueur Truffle Bar from Sterling Confections, from $15.



HOT PASSION

Smother almost anything in a rich fondue of White Chocolate Pear Chardonnay and Chocolate Pear Cabernet sauces. Just add fruit and imagination.

Chocolate Lover’s Gift Set with Fondue Kit from A Perfect Pear from Napa Valley, $44.

You can find more Valentine’s Day gift ideas for Her, for Him, for your Classic Valentine and for your Quirky Valentine at Foodoro.com. And all Valentine’s gifts have flat $4.95 ground or $14.95 2-Day shipping, so go ahead and indulge!

Some interesting data on gifting.

We like to measure the performance of everything at Foodoro. So when we heard that San Francisco—our hometown—was going to mandate the composting of all waste, we were curious if it would be worthwhile to separate our trash into yet another bucket (the law already requires that we recycle).

The results were quite surprising:

Foodoro's Waste: Composting, Recycling, Trash

Over the course of 15 weeks, we composted half of our waste! Coupled with the 33% that we recycle, our true waste output was 18% by weight. We’re not quite at “zero-waste” like some companies (see related NYT article), but our goal is to get above 90% by the end of the year.

On a personal note for Foodoro, we were thrilled to find out that our compost actually goes to growers and gardeners around the Bay Area, including some of the farmers actually selling products through our marketplace!

A wonderful thing, to go full circle.

Note 1: The two biggest weeks of compost output was a result of watermelon rinds and corn husks. Ah, summer!

Note 2: Our methodology was simple. One of us stood on a scale with the bag of composting/recycling/trash. Sometimes messy but effective.

In recent years, Amazon.com has been adding products sold by other companies to its Marketplace. This is great because it means more product selection and better prices. And the purchase experience is consistently good; it’s not much different whether you buy a product from Amazon.com directly or from a third-party.

The biggest difference is the emails received post-transaction. I recently made a purchase from Amazon.com that resulted in 9 follow-up transaction emails. Yikes!

These are the emails:

1. Order confirmation for 3 products from 3 different vendors  (from Amazon)
2. Shipping notice from Vendor #1
3. Shipping notice from Vendor #2
4. Shipping notice from Vendor #3
5. Shipping notice for Vendor #1 (from Amazon)
6. Shipping notice for Vendor #2 (from Amazon)
7. Shipping notice for Vendor #3 (from Amazon)
8. Rate Your Transaction (from Amazon)
9. Review your purchases (from Amazon)

It’d be great if Amazon didn’t send 2 different emails for each product shipment, and even combine the “Rate Your Transaction” and “Review Your Purchases” into a single email. This way, 9 emails would be cut down to a more manageable 5.

(On top of these transaction emails, I’ve gotten 15 marketing emails in the last 30 days from Amazon. This just adds to the email clutter I get from Amazon. I know I can opt out of the marketing emails, but I actually like some of them.)

Email is a critical communication channel for Foodoro’s own marketplace, and we’re trying to be careful not to flood our users’ inboxes (we hate spam, too!). Currently, a purchase from 3 different foodmakers would result in 4 emails:

1. Order confirmation
2. Your Order Has Shipped (Foodmaker #1)
3. Your Order Has Shipped (Foodmaker #2)
4. Your Order Has Shipped (Foodmaker #3)

We are considering sending a follow-up email asking about the product and user experience. Any thoughts if this would be too much email?

We were curious about how far products sold through Foodoro.com travel, so we took a look at our sales based on ZIP code data:

We found it somewhat surprising that one-third of all products sold through Foodoro travel under 300 miles!

Yet, it also makes perfect sense because buying locally means cheaper shipping.  We dug further into our data to find out just how much more expensive it is to ship beyond 300 miles:

• Shipping prices increase by 25% when shipping 300 to 1000 miles
• Shipping prices increase by 40% when shipping over 1000 miles

The second biggest group in the chart above is for products that travel 2400 – 2700 miles. This can be readily explained by bi-coastal purchases (e.g., CA to NY and vice versa). Many of the products on Foodoro are so unique that people will go to great lengths—literally!—to buy them.

Recently, I was speaking with a die-hard environmentalist friend who called me out on claims that e-commerce is greener than traditional shopping. I had remembered reading something about this a few months ago, so I thought I’d dig it up and write a post.

Carnegie Mellon’s Green Design Institute broke down the energy use and carbon emissions of buying something from Buy.com (an online marketplace like Foodoro) versus a brick and mortar retailer. It turns out that buying online had a 35% positive environmental impact by consuming less energy and emitting less carbon dioxide.

By far, the most important factor on environmental impact is the driving to and from a retail store by the customer, which accounts for 65% of all energy use and emissions. Yikes!

Granted, these figures in the chart above are based on a set of averages, including a 14 mile round trip for consumer driving. Traditional retail could look better if people walk or use mass transportation in major cities… then again, the line for the parking lot at our local San Francisco farmers’ market always seems to be pretty full.

So are shipping carriers that much more efficient at delivering packages to your door compared to driving to the store? Consider that delivery trucks are often carrying thousands of pounds of goods at once and that they even avoid making left turns to save on gas !

Here’s a link to the full study for those interested.

Is your mom warm-hearted? Très chic? The perfect hostess?

Treat your mother to something delicious this Mother’s Day! We’ve got gifts for all kinds of moms.

Click on the image below to go to a tasty gift guide:

This article in the SF Chronicle does a great job chronicling the tension between creating sustainable food and running a business. My jaw dropped when I read this:

Not at all, apparently.

California’s Bay Area has been making chocolate for 160 years, since Ghirardelli was founded in 1849 as the second-oldest chocolate company in the U.S.* And we think that the Bay Area tradition is stronger than ever. Here’s an incomplete list of local chocolate makers, confectioners and other devotees to this “food of the gods“. It’s sorted roughly by year of founding (click to see larger image):

NOTE: logos aren’t linked to their sites… use Google!

*Baker’s Chocolate started in 1780 in Massachusetts is the oldest. It’s now owned by Kraft Foods.