Purchasing and Packaging

Sourcing with integrity is central to the way we operate at apetito. We recognise that the decisions we make have a significant effect upon the resilience and profitability of our business and have wider social, environmental and economic impacts upon the communities we work in, and on a global scale. Where we can, and where it's best to, we support local producers, but we need to find the right balance across the three pillars of sustainability. Catherine Harris, apetito's Purchasing Manager, explains how she puts the company's sustainable procurement policy into practice:

My objective is to find the best quality product within our available budget. Clients rightly want a good meal, but many of them are spending public money and need to keep their expenditure as low as possible. Because of the large quantities of raw produce that we use, we get best value in what can be an increasingly volatile market.

We are proud of the fact that we achieve a good balance across local and international procurement. We see it as part of our sustainability agenda that we support the developing world and try to use whole lifecycle impacts to make practical buying decisions. Sometimes the overall carbon footprint of food produced in one location is lower than that in the UK, or is simply not available at a commercially viable price in the UK. We always strive to achieve a balance across ethical, social and environmental issues.

Indeed this approach is supported by a recent Cabinet Office document (Ref.1) based upon a report by the Manchester Business school to DEFRA (Ref.2). This said "research on lifecycle impacts of a range of food products shows that the argument that local food has less environmental impact is weak and that global sourcing can be better for some foods".

The way in which our raw materials are produced, particularly those from non-EU suppliers, is a matter of great interest. From an ethical perspective we only engage with new suppliers who have signed the Ethical Trading Initiative standard, which promotes and improves the implementation of corporate codes of practice to cover supply chain working. We will be rolling this requirement out to our existing suppliers during 2008.

I also visit some of our suppliers to see for myself how they produce our ingredients. For example, I recently inspected our chicken supplier in Thailand who provides us with cooked meat. I was very pleased by what I saw: the standards in the plant probably exceed some of those I have seen in Britain. Some people have concerns over developing world suppliers, however many of these countries are desperate to trade with the EU and so need to meet very high standards.

I have also spent time with our potato suppliers in Denmark and the Netherlands and took the chance to check the conditions in which their farm labourers live and work. We focus hard on the ethical side of our contracts, while considering the sustainability of our business.

All our imported food comes by sea, rather than by air, which considerably limits our carbon footprint as shipping is such an efficient mode of transport.

apetito is a large consumer of packaging, much of which is recycled materials. We are talking to suppliers about how we can return more of the large quantities of packaging we receive from them.

One of the initiatives that we have developed allows Healthcare customers to receive their meals in reusable crates, which are returned to us to be restocked and reused.

There is, quite rightly, a lot of pressure from customers to be ethical and sustainable in everything we do. But that pressure can conflict with demands to keep costs down. As with many things, there is a balance to be struck. I believe that we successfully achieve that balance but, with things always changing, we can never be complacent.

Catherine Harris
Purchasing Manager