Ever wonder how an indoor vertical farm achieves its sustainability goals while remaining profitable? Well, we definitely do, which is why we had a very long conversation with Katie Seawell, chief commercial officer at Bowery Farming, a New York-based indoor vertical farming and digital agriculture company at the Porte Conference in June.

Seawell told Retail Brew about keeping the business afloat while meeting its circularity goals and being able to communicate all of it with its customers.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

On being sustainable yet scalable

One of the biggest things we can do—and I think this is really important when you’re thinking about the environment—is a material assessment of your business. You can’t measure everything. So what are those things that are actually going to move the needle? So for us, energy consumption is one of them. But we also know that scale and output is one of the biggest levers we have to drive efficiency through the system and drive efficient efficiency and energy consumption, which is why we’re very focused on yield and output and efficiency coming out of the farm.

Keep reading here.—JS

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Let’s set aside the fact that “ice cream is so good,” because it seems TikTok is looking to open up its Shop feature to a lot more retailers.

WooCommerce is expanding its partnership with TikTok, and its merchants will be among the first to bring their shops to TikTok Shop in the United States.

With TikTok Shop, WooCommerce merchants can bring all their products to the social platform and sell directly to users with in-feed videos, live streams, and through a featured product showcase tab on their profile.

• The goal is to create a more streamlined shopping experience that allows buyers and browsers to move seamlessly from product discovery to checkout without leaving the TikTok app.
• TikTok began testing its Shop feature in the US last November in an effort to compete with Amazon and other retail giants.
• Some of the brands participating so far include PacSun, Revolve, Willow Boutique, and KimChi Chic.

The numbers don’t lie: Last year, WooCommerce partnered on a TikTok for WooCommerce extension in which merchants joined the platform and started running ads. The extension also now supports TikTok’s Smart Performance Campaigns, an automated ad creation and targeting platform.

Keep reading here.—KM

These days it seems Kermit was onto something about being green. ESG, for environmental, social, and corporate governance, until recently popularly championed by companies, is now criticized as “woke capitalism” by some Republican lawmakers, and was debated in the House Oversight Committee in May.

The Washington Post recently wrote about “greenhushing,” which it described as when brands “keep quiet about their environmental goals, sometimes for fear of public backlash.”

But it turns out one company that seems unconcerned about being labeled as “woke” is, fittingly, the maker of popular sleep-aid brand Unisom. Sanofi Consumer Healthcare North America—whose brands also include Allegra, Rolaids, and that oxymoronic chestnut, Icy Hot—recently received B Corp Certification from B Lab, which evaluates companies on what it calls “a company’s entire social and environmental impact.”

Among the efforts that earned the company its certification:

• Eliminating 35 tons of plastic packaging per year by removing plastic windows on Allegra, Nasacort, and other products.
• Relying on only renewable electricity for its North American manufacturing and distribution sites (through the purchase of wind-energy renewable energy credits).
• Having 41% of senior leadership roles filled by women, roles it defines as C-suite and one level below, with a commitment to reach 50/50 gender parity in those positions by 2025.

Keep reading here.—AAN

Today’s top retail reads.

Show me what’s up: Hormel has a person whose job is to understand what people like to eat, so they can sell it to you in the future, and spoiler: A lot of us apparently love Spam. (the Star Tribune)

Hot topic: It’s very hot outside if you haven’t noticed, but warehouse and delivery workers very much have, and are demanding heat-wave protections from retailers. (Modern Retail)

What does it all mean? We just had three major retail events: Prime Day, CommerceNext, and NRF Nexus. It’s an opportunity to dig into what’s going on in the current e-commerce landscape. (Retail Geek)

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The numbers you need to know.

The back-to-school shopping season basically starts in the middle of the summer now, and some parents have already taken that on with Prime Day.

• Almost half (46%) of parents have started back-to-school shopping, largely because of Prime Day, during which 42% of parents said they were able to snag early deals, according to decision intelligence company Morning Consult.

Although inflation is letting up, Morning Consult says household budgets are still tight, but spending on back to school has increased for the second year in a row. In 2022, parents’ predicted forecast spending was extremely high due to massive price increases, and they say 2023 will look very similar to 2022.

• Even though the number of US adults who are “very concerned” about inflation has come down to 47% from a high of 64%, budgets are still straining in back-to-school categories such as apparel.
• More than half (56%) of households earning at least $100,000 a year have started back-to-school shopping. At the same time, 39% of those making below $50,000 have already started, which means, according to Morning Consult, late-season shoppers are likely to be more price sensitive.

“While the families who got a jump-start on shopping earlier in July had many discounts to help them along, those who waited haven’t necessarily missed out on deals,” Claire Tassin, lead retail and e-commerce analyst at Morning Consult, said. “Early-bird families tend to have higher incomes and thus flexible budgets that allow them to shop earlier.”