Case Study - The Treat Kitchen

Overview of the company’s sustainability goals

We are a fast-paced growing company with an aim to make responsible choices and improvements. We want to understand our carbon footprint and the total lifecycle of our products. We want to make reductions in our carbon usage. We want to offer our customers products that are sustainably sourced and produced. We want to reduce waste within our production and business activities. We want to provide financial sustainability for our team members.

Implemented Solutions

Treat Kitchen plant a tree for every purchase made online and instore. We have offset the carbon usage of all our employees both at home and at work. Where possible all packaging uses FSC cardboard with many products being made from recyclable materials. 

We have installed carboard and plastic bailers at our packing facility to ensure that waste products from our facility and others on our estate can be recycled by our supplier. Our sales team operate remotely and keep visits to a minimum. In store we collect used packaging that cannot be recycled by the local authority and send it to specialised recycling facilities. Excess stock is either sent to the outlet store or donated to food banks and charities. We are a Real Living Wage organisation offering our team members a wage that meets the costs of living, not just the government minimum. Based on a recent sustainability audit we are replacing all lighting at our facility to LED. We have been educating ourselves by undertaking carbon literacy training. 

*A bailer is a machine that crushes our waste cardboard and compacts it into large bails that are then sold back to the papermill to be recycled. We also installed a plastic bailer which does the same for all waste plastic – such as pallet wrap and cellophane.

Benefits of your sustainability solutions

The installation of the cardboard bailer has reduced the number of lorries coming to our site significantly. We are also getting paid for each bail created. The introduction of the store has provided us with a solution for any overstocks preventing waste but also allowed us to promote our links with local community organisations like Double Impact and Base 51. Our use of recyclable materials and our upcycleable products has helped us to secure deals with major supermarkets and retailers. Our partnership with Ecologi has helped us offset 355 tonnes of CO2e. Ecologi are the platform we use to offset the carbon usage of our workforce both at home and at work. We are also signed up to their scheme where they plant a tree for every B2C sale we make. We have a section on their website where we can view the carbon offset projects, we have funded and also see how many trees we have planted. https://ecologi.com/treatkitchen

Testimonial

We are at the start of our sustainability journey but we're really proud of the small steps we have taken so far such as planting over 22,600 trees. I am really excited about the projects we are beginning with NTU where we can make further carbon savings and work towards environmental accreditations for the company. Larger companies might be the largest polluters, but I believe SMEs can plan a key role by changing and improving the way we work. Small changes can lead to big improvements. I did my CLT with NTU as part of the SAIL course. I am pleased to see that the BID is offering CLT, the more people who undertake the training the greater the awareness of the action that is needed to reduce our carbon usage.