Linda Fritz, creator of
CRESBI Crates, hates waste. For this reason (and a few others), she created a reusable crate that is more sturdy and durable than reusable or plastic bags, can be cleaned in a dishwasher and folds up flat for easy storage. Now she’s on a quest to bring a crate to every home in America.
It all started with having just a little too much edamame. As the owner of Sun Sugar Farms in Veron, Ky., she has been growing edamame and sun sugar cherry tomatoes for several years. By 2012, she was selling hundreds of pounds of edamame and donating some to schools with a goal of getting Kentucky children to eat healthier.
“I was transporting the edamame in boxes, and I hated that the boxes were getting soggy and probably getting thrown away,” Fritz says. “So I bought a couple bins like the produce guys at the grocery store use. And I thought that if only it was a little taller and a little lighter, why couldn’t we use this?”
The bins Fritz bought originally were a bit too large and industrial for what she was looking for, but after many trials and tribulations, she found a crate that was the perfect size and weight for her idea, sunk her savings into it and hasn’t looked back.
Fritz dubbed the crates CRESBI as an acronym for Collapsible Reusable Environmentally-friendly Stackable Box Idea.
“One CRESBI crate can replace up to six plastic bags and also can replace reusable bags, which start to fall apart if you wash them, and there’s nowhere to recycle them,” Fritz says. “But the best part about the crates is the time they save. You simply put your items in them with the barcodes up and have the checker use their handheld scanner to scan the items right in the crate.”
Currently, Fritz is selling the crates on her website,
www.cresbicrate.com, but has also struck up deals with a few local vendors to carry them in the Ohio/Kentucky area. In her first year, with only her website, she’s already received orders from across the country.
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