Hello!
What a wild year it has been. As always, THANK YOU for supporting us through it all. It’s been four years (!) of composting food scraps now, and we are consistently grateful for the opportunity to be your local community composters. Huzzah!
We have a couple of announcements and events we’d like to share with you all as we get closer to the end of the year.
Price Increases
First, the most uncomfortable (but potentially unsurprising), is a PSA about an upcoming price increase to our service. As of December 1st, 2022 we will be raising our prices to the following schedule:
Weekly Pickups will be raised to $45.00/every 4 weeks (+ tax)
Bi-Weekly Pickups will be raised to $30.00/every 4 weeks (+ tax)
Monthly Pickups will raised to $15.00/every 4 weeks (+ tax)
Drop-Offs will be raised to $18.00/every 4 weeks (+ tax)
Party Buckets and additional buckets will be raised to $1.50 per (+ tax)
We don’t like raising prices. When we started ScrapDogs we were determined to make composting with us as accessible and affordable as possible. But while we’re still committed to that dream, we’re a bit more open-eyed to the reality of our costs these days.
The big drivers for us (pun intended): labor, fuel, and vehicle repair and maintenance. For us to ensure the long term sustainability of our operations, we need to raise prices and internalize all of our costs. To get through this past year, which included hiring our first employees and slogging through inflation, we had to supplement our cash flow with some additional investment and forgo owner payouts. In other words, the two of us worked for free for most of the year. At our current - and forecast - rate of growth, that’s not a long-term solution. So we’ve come to you, our customers, for help. (Not on the day of your daughter’s wedding, we hope. We know each other better than that.)
We owe the enduring operation of ScrapDogs to you all, and we want to ensure we’re accountable to you, always. If you have questions about these price changes, please reach out to us by email or phone, or talk with us in person at our upcoming Annual Meeting! (See below.)
Annual Meeting and Customer Appreciation Event
Despite some trials and tribulations, this year has had many exciting moments for ScrapDogs. We’d like to look back on those major landmarks and celebrate with you.
On November 29th from 5:30-7:30 at American Flatbread in Rockport, ScrapDogs will host its first ever annual meeting and customer appreciation event. We’ll have a quick presentation about our work and hopes for the future, present the hard data (with some fun visuals) that are relevant to our mission, answer all of your burning questions about PFAS and our price increase, and then leave the rest of the time for socializing with other ScrapDoggers.
We’re hoping that this will become an annual event where we can appreciate all of our customers for helping make this work possible. Bring your friends and get some ‘za!
Please RSVP here before 11/27. We’ll make sure to have a hard copy of your annual report on hand. It’ll contain the total amount of food waste you diverted for the past 12 months and an estimate of the CO2 emissions you’ve avoided by composting with us.
Goodbye Food Boxes :’(
While the Food Box Pilot Program was once an exciting area of potential growth for us, it hasn’t exactly worked out the way that we thought it would. Interest in the program has dwindled, and our capacity to sustain the program is limited. We will discontinue the program after our deliveries the week of December 11th.
If you are interested in getting a mix of local produce delivered to your home or to local hub spots, we love and recommend the following farmers and farm orgs:
Turtle Rock Farm (potentially spring/summer season)
On the upside, ScrapDogs will continue to deliver shelf-stable goods indefinitely from our online shop (where you order your compost). We plan to continue bringing you yummy, interesting local goodies from our favorite growers and producers - so keep an eye out!
Open Application for our Advisory Board
As ScrapDogs has grown, the two of us have felt a growing sense of responsibility not just for the longevity of the business, but for the community that this project has built in the process.
In order to make decisions that reflect the interests of this wide-reaching community of composters, we’re starting an Advisory Board: a small, informal group of people that we can run big ideas by, share a deeper view of the organization’s financials with, and talk openly with about how to continue this work long into the future.
If you think this might be of interest to you, please email Davis. A quick blurb about some of your background and why you think you’re a good fit to provide us with some meaningful insight is all we need to get started.
We’re hoping that this Advisory Board would meet twice a year: once at the end of January to review year-end financials and once at the end of July for a mid-year outlook. Meetings won’t run longer than 2 hours, and members will have no legal responsibility or obligation to ScrapDogs other than providing honest input. Any other volunteer time is not necessary - though not discouraged!
As always, please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts. You can reach us at 207-97-SCRAP or at hello@scrapdogscompost.com.
With much love and gratitude,
D + T (+ Roo!)
