Our vision is to be a leader in sustaining air, water and land by minimising the resources needed to produce quality chicken products and minimise waste generated.
We are dedicated to the responsible stewardship of the precious natural resources required to produce our products and feed millions of families around the world each day. We have implemented an environmental management programme focused on reducing our environmental footprint and increasing the environmental compliance and efficiency of our operations in order to produce more food with fewer resources.
We are continually strengthening our commitment and evolving our approach, allowing us to grow our business and meet the needs of our customers, while responsibly preserving available environmental resources for the use of future generations. We believe we can play one of the leading roles in feeding the world in a manner that aligns with our customers values and results in healthy, quality products that benefit society and our shared future.
What we are doing to tackle food waste
Our corporate responsibility agenda focuses our efforts on developing our business in a sustainable and ethical way, investing and improving wherever we can to meet present and future needs.
We believe our active efforts to reduce food waste are in alignment with both ‘Courtauld 2025’ and the Champions 12.3 group, which will ensure that we play our part to reduce food waste by half, in accordance with UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3.
Over the last year, through a number of focused projects, we have calculated a reduction of food waste of more than 1,000 tonnes from across our sites. Our food waste reduction initiatives have focused on three key areas:
Redistribution
Since 2015, we have donated more than 100 tonnes of surplus food to those in need, enough for over 250,000 meals, through our charity partners, ‘FareShare’ in the UK.
Improving shelf life with smarter packaging
One highlight has been the launch of a new smarter packaging solution- resealable film designed to improve shelf-life and tackle food waste in the home. This is easier for the consumer to open at home or on the go and allows them to reseal the pack without the need to decant it into a tub or wrap in cling film - something we know a lot of consumers don’t have the time to do.
Investing in new equipment
We also invested in new equipment which will result in saving approximately 1,172 tonnes of cooked chicken going to waste annually; the equivalent of 750,000 chickens.
Food waste data commentary
• We measured our food waste across our facilities in the UK between September 2017 and August 2018. • Total production for the period was 763,995 tonnes. Our total Food Waste was 15,686 tonnes, which is the equivalent of 2.0% of our production.
• The majority of our food waste is made up of Chicken products that are unsuitable for human consumption (Category 3 Waste) - 53% of waste (8376 Tonnes). The remainder is made up of semi-solid material that is produced as a by-product during treatment of wastewater.
• Over 64% of our food waste is sent to anaerobic digestion (AD), which generated in excess of 26 GWh of renewable electricity. This is equivalent to almost 10% of the annual electricity used across our UK facilities. The remainder is disposed of in a responsible manner via land application and composting. The environmental benefits of these include soil conditioning and fertilising (improving the soil's physical qualities and ability to provide nutrition for plants).
