Sustainability

We take environmental issues very seriously at Cotswold Veg Box. Whether this is through supporting growers and food producers who use plastic-free packaging, recycling all of our cardboard, sourcing our produce as locally as possible, or using a business model that nearly eliminates food waste, we’re always trying to maintain an ethical perspective on how to improve our business.

Plastic

We’re not completely plastic-free, the industry has a long way to go, and us, as a tiny business in comparison to some, have very little influence on the decisions of the growers. We have managed to make some small changes in the time we have been established. Our mushroom supplier now uses compostable packaging thanks to our encouragement and one of our main suppliers of British fruit is also now using compostable packaging to replace their plastic punnets. We’ll keep doing what we can. We won’t say we’re plastic-free because we sometimes can’t control how produce arrives and if it comes in plastic, we feel it is right for that plastic to fulfil its purpose rather than being removed by us to give a false impression to our customers.

Local Growers

Food miles are important to think about when talking about sustainability. Our two main suppliers are both situated very close to our warehouse, one just on the other side of our village, the other a few miles down the road in The Vale of Evesham. Although we do use goods that are imported by our suppliers at certain times of the year due to seasonality, we have an amazing array of local growers in the area which we always look to choose from when their produce is in season. The Vale of Evesham is perhaps the most important growing area in the country and having this right on our doorstep really helps us to reduce our food-miles.

Food waste

We are hugely proud to say that we produce almost zero food waste. We order very specifically each week after we have collected all your orders to make sure we get the amounts just right. Anything that we have left over is donated to local food banks or distributed through the Pay-it-Forward scheme we set up to help tackle food poverty in our area. Any produce that isn’t up to our consumer standards is sent to local farmers who feed it to their animals. It is only when something arrives totally rotten (which is very rare) that we add it to our food waste to be sent off to a digestion tank to be converted into compost/fertiliser.

Recycling

There is a lot of cardboard involved in the distribution of fruit and veg. We always make sure to bundle this up and send it to be recycled and also return any plastic/wooden crates used by our suppliers so they can be reused. The cardboard boxes we send our produce in are easily recycled. We are considering using more permanent vessels to distribute our produce in at some point too, but this involves a large investment in storage, cleaning and the packaging itself that we’re not quite ready for, especially with the risk of contamination from returned boxes at the moment.