The War on Food Waste
The UK throws away 6.7 MILLION tonnes of food per year, an equivalent of £10.2 billion a year, but not us! At Cotswold Veg Box, we have made it our life’s mission to never put a healthy veg down.
Firstly, by having a deadline for our orders, we know roughly how much we need to buy from our suppliers which almost eliminates any waste from the start. This is why if you pop an order through after the deadline, we aren’t being rude by not squeezing you in, we just might not have enough produce left to make up a decent box for you. (If we can, we do!)
We know that fruit and vegetables come in all shapes and sizes and we don’t believe fresh produce should have to conform to society’s beauty standards. So, although you may find the occasional wonky carrot and ugly onion in your box… and we’ve never even seen a pretty celeriac, you will always have fantastic quality.
Any small quantities of leftovers get split between the team and turned into something beautiful with our families or lobbed into a soup, frozen for a rainy day. Any items we have left over in bulk are taken to Shipston Food Bank on a Saturday morning to ensure they still end up in a good home. We’re really grateful we’re able to do this as we hear so many sad stories about large companies and restaurants not having the flexibility in ‘procedure’ to give away excess food. We’re able to do lots of other lovely things for the local community thanks to you, our wonderful Veg Box family, which you can read about here.
Anything that’s slightly past its best gets dished out to local farmers to use as animal feed and lastly, as a very last resort, anything that the pigs won’t eat and the humans can’t use, we pop into our food bin. However, a massive shout out to our waste company, Grundon, who feel the same way about food waste as we do. All the food waste they collect is sent to Anaerobic Digestion (AD) facilities, where naturally occurring organisms break it down to produce biogas, which is then converted into renewable electricity and fed into the National Grid; in addition to producing fertiliser which is used for agriculture and land regeneration. Plus, their specialist food waste collection vehicles also avoid adding to our carbon footprint because they are all certified CarbonNeutral®, so they don’t add to our carbon footprint even when they come to collect our bins!
