Richard Sebastian, Green Economy Program Coordinator at PEA, interviewing Cary Clifford, Co-owner of PEA Green Business Network member Camino Bakery.
RS: Cary, thanks for taking time today to chat with PEA a little about your background, your role helping caffeinate and feed locals at the 3 Camino Bakery locations in town, and your journey, as a business owner, into thinking about and taking action on sustainability.
Let’s start off with your path–literally–to opening Camino. I know from your website that you named Camino Bakery after the Camino de Santiago, the famous route in Spain you walked years ago. It sounds like that journey had a significant impact on you. Can you share how it inspired you to open Camino Bakery here in Winston-Salem?
CC: Yes, I walked the Camino de Santiago across Spain in 1997. It was such a formative experience in my life! The month I spent walking to Santiago was a rare opportunity to reflect on what was important to me, what I wanted out of life. It was also a wonderful chance to soak in Spanish culture, which involves hanging out with friends a lot, talking, eating delicious food, and drinking espresso to start the day & a local red wine to end the day.
Years later when I started my business, I thought, what are my favorite things? What most reflects what I want to do here? And my immediate answer to both questions was: the Camino! A joyful experience involving delicious food and drink partaken with friends.
RS: Wow, that is an origin story I can totally relate to. I spent some time in Spain when I was younger and Spanish culture still has quite the pull on me. I’m also a Camino regular–your Brookstown location is a short walk from the PEA office–and I definitely vibe with the cozy, friendly, community space you’ve created there.
Camino Bakery is a PEA Green Business Network member and I am excited to talk with you about some of the notable sustainability goals your business has achieved. But first: what drew you to join our Green Business Network (GBN) in the first place? Was making your business more sustainable already a focus for Camino? What were you hoping to achieve?
CC: I’ve been concerned about climate change and our planet’s welfare my whole adult life, so sustainability has always been important to me. I’ve known about PEA and admired the work that y’all do for years; I recently did a 3-year stint as a member of the PEA board, and got to see first hand how dedicated y’all are to the great work that you do.
Our daily decisions at Camino can be quite challenging, because thin margins in the food industry mean we have a very limited budget to work with. But our goal has always been to try our very best to do what we can for the planet & the people on it.
RS: I imagine it can be rewarding to be able to not only channel formative experiences like walking the Camino de Santiago into your small business, but also have your company’s practices reflect your values about sustainability and climate change. What were some of the sustainability goals you wanted to reach when Camino first joined the Network, given the challenges and budgetary constraints you mentioned? Did you already have some idea of where you wanted to focus your efforts?
CC: We reached one of our big sustainability goals a few months ago: we bought an electric delivery van! (Shoutout to Will Eley, PEA’s Green Jobs Program Manager, who helped us find resources on tax credits and a grant from Duke Energy.) This goal, although expensive on the front end, is paying for itself in the long run. We’ve already saved over $1,000 on gas this year. Of course the more important thing is that the $1,000 saved represents hundreds of gallons of gas that we didn’t have to burn. So our new goal is to replace our other 2 delivery vehicles with electric vans at some point.
RS: Yes, congratulations on your very cool, new EV delivery van. We’ve post a picture of it for our readers. It is a great example of the win-win structure of these sustainability investments: significantly reducing your company’s emissions is a big environmental win, of course, something to feel good about, but you win economically, too, with reduced costs that pay off that initial investment in the long run. Sometimes it’s not even that long of a long run, especially when tax breaks and grants help defray that initial investment. Then it becomes a virtuous cycle, right: you can reinvest your savings into purchasing additional EVs, like you’re doing at Camino.
CC: Another goal for us has been composting, which has proven more challenging. For a few years we were composting with a local company but during the pandemic that company stopped serving commercial customers. We do have a kind farmer who composts our kitchen scraps, so that’s great, but we hope that the City will at some point start a composting program.
RS: I think both of your goals here make a great argument for being part of a network like the Green Business Network. You have the advantage of someone like Will Eley’s tax credit expertise and PEA’s organizational support for your EV purchase. Your composting ambitions–which is shared by other GBN members– could be a collective solution with your network peers working with the City. Do you agree? Before joining GBN, would an EV purchase have been a goal for Camino, at least in the near term? And how does that achievement make you think about your composting ambitions?
CC: While we did always have the goal of buying an EV, it's absolutely true that being part of the Green Business Network made that goal so much easier to achieve, and more generally, in making Camino more sustainable. It’s wonderful to have people that I know and trust, like Will, who I can reach out to for advice and assistance with these kinds of projects. As a small business owner, I’m always juggling 50 different things, so it’s such a great help when I don’t have to do all that legwork myself.
RS: Cary, thank you for sharing a bit about Camino Bakery and also for the great sustainability work you have done and continue to do as a Green Business Network member. It is inspiring to me and, I hope, to our readers, and shows how much we can accomplish when we work together. PEA looks forward to accomplishing more big things with Camino in the coming year.
CC: Thank you. We’re so grateful for PEA’s leadership in making Winston-Salem a more sustainable community!