This is the first in a new series featuring innovative Seattle businesses that offer Bicycle Benefits and help encourage the local bicycle economy. If your business offers Bicycle Benefits and would like to be featured, email [email protected].

For Theo Chocolate, encouraging customers and employees to bike to their Fremont chocolate factory fits with the company’s conscious outlook on life.

“Generally, Theo is a very mission-driven company, based on our beliefs that all life on the planet is interconnected,” said Audrey Lawrence, the sales and marketing manager at Theo.

As a Bicycle Benefits member, Theo’s factory showroom offers one half-price classic chocolate bar per visit to anyone with a Bicycle Benefits sticker. That means you can get a full-size organic, fairly-traded, locally-crafted chocolate bar for only about $2. But only if you bike.

Theo is also so interested in encouraging its employees to bicycle to work that the company created a bicycle committee to look for ways they can make it more appealing. When they noticed that employees were having a hard time finding covered bike parking on rainy days, they created a covered bike parking area that can fit about 25 bikes.

And it is paying off. On any given day, 12-20 of the factory’s 55 employees bike to their jobs, including Lawrence.

“It makes it a lot easier for people to bike all year round,” she said.

But beyond Theo’s mission and desire for healthy customers and employees, offering Bicycle Benefits simply makes business sense, said Lawrence. Here were a couple of her reasons:

• It says something about your business’s values. It is important to consumers to support businesses with values in line with their own.
• It’s cool to contemplate sub-groups of customers. Cyclists are quite engaged and well-aware of the different community support that is out there.
• Theo has chosen to support the environment. For example, they use green energy as much as they can. They also support the use of bicycles.

But, of course, Theo would like to remind people bicycling that they have more to offer than just a good deal.

“Chocolate is an excellent pick-me-up for those long bike rides,” said Lawrence.

Bicycle Benefits is a program designed to support people who bike and bike-friendly businesses. Member businesses buy Bicycle Benefits stickers at discount and sell them to customers for $5. Once you have a sticker on your helmet, you can get deals from member businesses all around Seattle and in cities across the United States and Canada. Seattle Bike Blog is a local supporter of the program. To find more Bicycle Benefits partners or to sign your business up, visit the Bicycle Benefits website.