'Sustainable': what does it actually mean?

Sustainability is a many headed beast, and there is no single answer on being ‘more sustainable’ or ‘less sustainable’ across all the different factors that we encounter in our industry. At Field & Flower we apply the same principles to our sustainability and environmental goals as we do everything else: how can we use the trust our customers have put in us to do the most good and cause the least harm to the things we and they care about.

We want to create and maintain a food system that works, that people can be proud to buy from and talk about. We have the privilege of directing your orders to farming communities producing food in sustainable, traditional ways, and feeding that information back to you. It’s my mission this year to tell that story in even more detail than ever before. We are the vehicle for the change that the Field & Flower customers want to see in the world, and with World Earth Day coming up next Tuesday 22nd April, I thought I’d talk through some of the most unique ways that we make this happen.

1. We go out and find local, British producers that line up with our principles and support their communities and customs. Fish is a great way to show this. In a standard supermarket, the unfortunate way to drive price down is to source fish from overseas. The damaging impact of this is twofold: our biggest buyers of fish are not only sourcing cheap imported fillets, but they are also refusing the price of British. This creates an issue where we become a massive exporter of our best fish, to the tune of £1.7Bn, and an even bigger importer of cheap fish, to the tune of £2.6Bn.

We don’t want to do this dance and take part in this egregious haulage of protein around the world, so have direct connection with Brixham port. This is where our Catch of the Days and most of our other fish is landed and we have that delivered by the team to us in Somerset several times a week. Your spend goes into supporting the communities of Brixham, the fishermen on small boats, which downstream helps groups like Waterdance (our fishing partner) build fishing vessels right here in the South West to continue their great sustainable work. This is one example of how our customers’ pounds fund support our homegrown produce and farming communities, rather than it being disseminated overseas.

2. Delivering fresh not frozen. A really unique thing we do at Field & Flower is that we source all of our meat and fish fresh from suppliers. We take this for granted because we’ve always done it, but when you look around, the artificial cryosphere that burns through electricity to hold and move food around the country at minus 18 is actually so pervasive. There’s always an argument that freezing product stops it going to waste, but in sourcing fresh, to order, with fantastic reliable subscription orders, waste is at an absolutely minimum at F&F and you can drop the meat and fish into your freezer when it arrives. We’re proud that we can operate day to day without the use of frozen articulated transport and cavernous subzero chillers, meaning that we can stay seasonal, up to date and keep our carbon footprint to a minimum.

3. Balancing carcass for a more sustainable food chain. Carcass balance is something we talk about a lot at Field & Flower (a lot more than everyone else, it seems!) and is something that we are constantly striving to perfect. In a nutshell, this is a very important way for us to take responsibility for our impact on farming and food waste through our supply chain. Let me demonstrate. Feeding 400 people with 400 chicken breasts means we need to find 200 chickens (two breasts per bird). That would leave the farmer with 400 legs, 400 wings, 200 carcasses and 200 lots of offal to find a home for. If we did this and continued to do this, Mr Farmer would need to cover the cost of the whole chicken with the sale of the breasts, and cause price disparity and massive imbalance, potentially meaning fantastic free-range chicken goes in the bin.

If we call that scenario 1, then scenario 2 could look like this: we feed 400 people with a choice of a leg, a breast or a pair of wings. Split evenly, we could feed 400 people with 80 chickens, because we’d have 160 breasts, 160 legs and 80 portions of wings. Mr Farmer then only needs to produce less than half the amount of chickens and we’re giving him more money for each bird because we’re buying the whole thing. The price is cooled off and we have more than halved the agricultural impact of feeding these people, notwithstanding the lessened impact of potential food waste and inefficient pricing.

4. Recyclable packaging. Outside of the meat itself, Jess and the team at HQ in Somerset have done also some amazing work in reducing our carbon footprint. You must have noticed (and likely celebrated) the replacement of our silver insulation liners with paper alternatives in a snazzy new box, but as well as improving the whole experience and making our liners curbside recyclable, it’s also much more sustainable. The new boxes use less cardboard, but it’s stronger (Jess tells me it’s to do with the fluting – she’s very excited about it) and means we save around 10,000 sq/m2 of cardboard a year. This is more than 20T of cardboard and up to 30T of co2 in manufacturing. P.S. Jess said I have to point out that our jars are even wrapped in paper bubble wrap (bubbles not included).

We’re constantly driving to make the most of each and every animal that we buy, and it’s only through the fantastic reception and feedback that we get from you, our customers, that we can be bold enough to make a real difference. We don’t take it for granted that we’ve been given the opportunity to make real, sustainable change, and it’s something we take really seriously. We attend conferences, keep up to date with the latest advances and reports and are constantly working to drive up our standards to really typify the best meat you can buy.