Airfreight
Avoiding food that has been airfreighted is one way that we can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of what we eat. Moving food quickly around the world by air has transformed the way that we eat, no longer eating by the seasons, able to get our fix of strawberries and green beans all year round. At Better Food, we believe that we can eat well all year round without the need for airfreight, and we’re doing everything we can to keep airfreighted goods out of our stores.
In our sourcing and our cafés
The most commonly airfreighted goods are the most perishable fruit and vegetables, such as berries, asparagus and green beans, and herbs and flowers too. We take care to ensure that none of our fresh produce, herbs or flowers are transported by air. First and foremost, we do this by sourcing as seasonally as possible, meaning that often we can buy most of our fresh produce from within the UK. When UK fruit and vegetables are in short supply, we’re careful not to buy in produce that is likely to have been airfreighted, sticking to goods we know can travel by road and sea.
Beyond our fresh produce aisle, still the vast majority of the finished products on our shelf are manufactured in the UK, and so arrive to us by road. Again, we take care to ensure that products coming from overseas are not airfreighted. It’s more difficult for us to make sure that our suppliers don’t use airfreighted ingredients in their products, but we do take steps to discourage this, and we work many likeminded ethical and sustainability-focussed suppliers who are just as careful in their sourcing as we are.
Where we want to be
We’re confident that we’re doing everything we can to keep airfreighted goods off our shelves. We’d like to continue to be a positive influence on our suppliers, encouraging them to be vigilant of the transport of their own ingredients and look for local alternatives whenever possible.
How are we keeping an eye on this policy and putting it into practice?
We ask all new suppliers to tell us whether their product or any of its ingredients are airfreighted in our supplier sourcing questionnaire, and we ask all suppliers to commit to not supplying us with produce or finished products that have been airfreighted in out supplier code of conduct agreement.