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its customers. To take an example from another sector, the jewellery chain Pandora recently announced that they were switching from natural diamonds to lab grown diamonds for ethical and environmental reasons. Leaving aside the fact that lab grown diamonds are probably less ethical and less environmentally friendly, to the best of my knowledge Pandora has never incorporated natural (i.e. real) diamonds in its jewellery designs. To offer another, rather more relevant example, many dog food producers plaster their packaging and marketing material with Union Jacks in order to imply the ingredients are British when they are not. Other producers boast about being regulated by Defra, which they have to be by law. A third group make much of compostable packaging even though it is almost certainly less environmentally friendly than certain alternatives. Another common practise is to brag about using Red Tractor Assured Standard ingredients... a standard so low that it is more or less useless.
The fact is, companies fudge and obfuscate to such an extent that even the most dedicated and informed consumer can be taken in. For this reason, at Honey’s we never make a claim we can’t back up – ideally with evidence provided by a third party. So, when we say, for instance, that all our meat and vegetables are produced/grown by British farmers we can prove it by showing you all our invoices. We also believe in certified standards. This is why we are signed up to ISO 14001, why we are organic certified and why we recently joined Pasture for Life.
Some practical examples
How do we put our principles into practice? This is probably best explained with a few policy examples:
• We have invested heavily in educating ourselves about canine health and nutrition and we employ a health care team, whose services we offer free to anyone who
contacts us – there is no need to be a customer.
• We are happy to show anyone who approaches us (again no need to be a customer) how to make their own raw dog food and we are happy to give anyone who asks
a copy of Honey’s Natural Feeding Handbook.
• All our customers have my personal email in case I can
help with something.
• We never, ever send out marketing material (such as
emails) and we have no sales function within the
company.
• The Honey’s team have been given a 20% interest in
the business via an Employee Incentive Plan.
• We have invested heavily in research and education. At the moment, for example, we are funding a Continuous Professional Development programme for vets and vet
nurses (see below).
Honey’s and the environment
I generally spend about two hours a day answering customer emails. I have to admit a high percentage – the majority, in fact – of these are more social than work related. Indeed, my correspondence is a source of great joy and interest to me. What of the rest? By far the most popular subject is the environment, that is to say: packaging, shipping, our carbon footprint and so forth. It features in all our regular management meetings, too. This week, for example, Guy, our production manager, and I have been discussing his experiments with dry ice and a particular type of insulation called TempGuard.
Before I summarise our environmental care policy, a quick point. Our aim is to do as little damage as possible and to seek out the least bad option. We are not concerned with the optics of a situation but by the hard facts. For example, our single use but re-cyclable plastic packaging is, we believe, more environmentally friendly than any of the
alternatives (if you would like to know more about this please ask
for a copy of our booklet on the subject). Anyway, our key environmental policies can be summarised as follows:
• Honey’s is, so far as we know, the first raw dog food producer in the world to have achieved ISO 14001 certification – the international standard for environmental management. We implemented our environmental management system (EMS) in 2013 and use it to ensure that we are measuring and minimising our environmental footprint.
• In 2020, we became the first raw dog food producer in the UK to become carbon neutral. We confirmed this in a signed pledge that was sent to the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change secretariat, in Bonn, Germany. The pledge requires us to monitor and measure our greenhouse gas emissions, reduce them and compensate any remaining emissions by offsetting, including through use of Certified Emission Reductions (CERs).
• Our internal Ethics, Environment & Sustainability Working Party which stopped meeting due to the pandemic will be resuming its activities this year so as to regularly consider how we can improve our carbon footprint.
• We use two external resources: a specialist environmental consultancy, Ryeden, and a separate carbon expert: Dr Simon Forsythe.
• In 2019, we joined 1% for the Planet – a global movement inspiring businesses and individuals to support environmental solutions through memberships and everyday actions. As business members we have committed to donating at least 1% of our sales to environmental causes.
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