Everyone loves a freshly prepared, freshly cooked pizza delivered to your door, although it can lead to some feelings of overindulgent guilt. While there isn't an easy way to reduce the guilt of the calories consumed, you can at least reduce the carbon emissions involved in the delivery by picking a firm that uses an electric vehicle.
Set up with the goal of making pizzas with a sustainable edge, Birtelli’s now delivers across Leamington Spa and Warwick, and has built a reputation not only for its locally sourced food and drink menus, but also for keeping a forensic focus on ensuring that it takes a holistic approach to the environment - from ensuring all of its packaging is composted to running a fleet of low and zero tailpipe emission vehicles.
Move Electric asked co-founder Jim Biryah for a week to keep a diary of how one of its vehicles, a Citroën Berlingo electric, slotted into its fleet, and to analyse some of the pros and cons of converting to electric.
“The main point to highlight is that the van is used primarily to transfer our prepared produce and stock from our central kitchen and depot to our Leamington store, plus other short ad-hoc journeys - and in that respect it is absolutely ideal - to the point that we often only have to charge it once a week,” says Biryah.
“Occasionally if we’re at full stretch with our fleet of eight Smart cars, it also gets called into action to deliver pizza - but that only highlights its versatility. Its official range of 106 miles may not sound much, and it is certainly impaired in winter, but it is absolutely enough for what we need.”
It’s when the van has been called up to cover other vehicles that Biryah says it has come closest to running out of charge. However, he points out that even in that emergency situation it hasn’t let them down. “Once our couriers didn’t arrive and we had to fill the van - and some of the cabin - up with our home-crafted pizza kits to ensure they were sent out to the courier’s distribution hub. It was a round trip of around 50 miles, and it wasn’t fully charged, but it did the job, albeit adding a few grey hairs as it indicated it had no range for the last few miles back to base.”
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