Hello everyone, we’re back after our little week long hiatus.  Unfortunately, our absence was not due solely to the fact that the Giants actually won the Super Bowl; we at River’s Edge suffered a great loss last week, one that has truly shaken us to our core.  Day by day things are getting better and we are beginning to return to some semblance of normalcy once again.  Please accept our apologies if we have been limited in contact with any of you.  In exceedingly difficult times such as these, it is important to really look inside of ourselves and make sure that we are sticking to our core values and not being swept away with the things in life that really won’t matter much in the long run.  We’ve been taking some time to do just that.

My young son found and brought to me a video many months ago, he began questioning us about the current trends in American agriculture and how animals are kept and treated prior to ‘becoming food’.  How a four year-old learned to effectively navigate an iPad and the World Wide Web is still beyond my wife and I, but when he presented the video to Coldplay’s “The Scientist”, performed hauntingly fantastic by the legendary Willie Nelson, we were truly taken aback.  If you missed it last night on the Grammy’s, Chipotle actually (finally) launched a national television ad spot highlighting the video which follows a pig farmer through his journey of caging and medicating animals to increase yields.  After becoming unhappy with the disturbing realities of industrialized meat production, the farmer (led by Nelson’s chilling chorus) decides to go “back to the start” and focus back on the core values lost through his business decisions.

We’ve talked about Chipotle before here on our blog and often on Twitter, but once again Steve Ells and his creative departments have forced me to sit back and remember that it is far too easy to get swept up in the business side of life and forget to honor and uphold the personal side of life – the really important side.  I am a huge fan of the Chipotle brand, though we have no professional affiliation with them (at least not yet ), they continue to impress me.  Their commitment to using hormone and antibiotic free meats in their restaurants is outstanding and should be a push to the entire industry to move toward a more humane and sustainable future.  If Chipotle can do it and still remain highly profitable and competitive (did I mention that they have plans to open around 160 new locations in 2012 alone!), then so can your concept.

Give some thought about what you can do to make a change for the better in your day-to-day work and life.  It’s time for some changes here too, we’ve lost a very dear friend whose affect on us will never be forgotten.  Perhaps it’s time we all head back to the start and reevaluate what positive change we can enact today.  What do you think?