🌱 How strong community ethics are at the centre of Aduna Superfoods’ success.

Featuring Aduna Superfoods, Wyke Farm, Avallen Spirits and more...

Mar 21, 2022

Happy Monday!

This week we cover:

Climate risks: How can your business adapt?
How strong community ethics are at the centre of Aduna Superfoods’ success.
In case you missed it: 🌱 We need to talk about Carbon Insetting.

> Good News Last Week

🎯 Avallen Spirits unveiled their paper bottle and designs, working with Frugalpac and Wonderworks Communications Ltd.

🎯 Proem Parades achieved B Corp certification.

🎯 Earth & Wheat, a wonky bread subscription service, has sent 700 boxes of bread to Ukrainian refugees in Poland.

🎯 MeliBio announced they’ve raise $5.7 million in a seed round, helping them make real honey without bees.

⭐️ Ocado has removed its best-before labels on some fresh produce, aiming to stop unnecessary food waste. Ocado have also signed up to WRAP’s Courtauld Commitment 2025, a voluntary agreement to cut waste in the grocery sector.

⭐️ Morrisons announced it is introducing new ‘rentable’ boxes on its Salad Bar in four trial stores. Each ‘rentable’ box is made from fully recyclable polypropylene. They’ve partnered with CauliBox on this initiative.

⚡️Too Good To Go announced they’ve saved 10,000,000 meals in the UK - enough to fill 80 football fields.

⚡️ SME Climate Hub launched a free carbon calculator, in partnership with Normative and Google. The toolkit aims to help businesses signing up to the SME Climate Hub to establish an emissions baseline, against which they can then track progress to halve emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

> Click on each link to read more.

> Quick Take

Climate risks: How can your business adapt?

It’s been all over the news: floods; fires; droughts; wind storms. Extreme weather disrupts everything, including business. Yet, when we talk about climate change adaptation, we tend to think it applies only to nations or multinational corporations. In the simplest terms, that’s not the case. The impacts have been becoming more prominent worldwide over the last decade, with a shocking 40% of small US businesses never reopening after hurricane events. According to research published by the LSE, however, UK businesses are worryingly naive when it comes to risks posed by severe weather. How can your business reduce risk? Assess, measure and mitigate first.

👉 Firstly, what are the key risks?

Flooding and coastal erosion are amongst the biggest threats posed to businesses. If your shop front, office or warehouses are coastal or riverside, then physical infrastructure, tourism and customer footfall are all in the firing line. A post-flooding event report by DEFRA on the effects of flooding in the Calder Valley found that, on top of the cost of physical repairs, of 21 businesses there was a collective decrease in sales of £831,324. This devastating figure is down to the cumulative effect of disruption to customers and impacts along the supply chain.
Water shortages are often overlooked at the local level. Yet, according to the UK government’s Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), water is becoming increasingly unavailable for abstraction across the country. If you’re a food brand, the agricultural source of your ingredients is at risk. Materials for clothing and accessories are impacted at every stage from source to processing. Water, simply put, is essential to the manufacturing of consumer goods. A shortage of water means a shortage of goods.
Global supply chains are increasingly unreliable due to extreme weather. Physical transportation, agriculture, declining supplies and even workforce exhaustion are all at risk from climate change. Coffee is one of the most notable examples of where this is happening already. Rising temperatures causes drought, reduced biodiversity devastates crop pollination and farmers’ health is at direct threat from extreme heat.

Last but not least, mandates are expected on climate disclosure in the coming years. This means that businesses are compelled to explore how they will be impacted by a range of climate scenarios and plan accordingly. This is good news. It means you can take action.

👉 What can small businesses do?

Measure. In 2017, the Taskforce for Climate Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) recommended that businesses utilise scenario analysis: evaluating a range of climate-related scenarios (for example, a 2 degree global temperature rise) to explore physical, strategic and financial risks and opportunities that could emerge. Historically, small brands have been left out of the conversation for the simple reason that many lacked the resources to assess and report climate risks. A fantastic article by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) details how not only is this no longer the case, but how measurement and disclosure uniquely benefits SMEs. Learn more about climate scenario analysis through the TCFD Hub, and find a partner to work with via our MEASURE database.
Mitigate. Start small. After Europe’s 2019 heatwave, for example, many businesses adapted working hours to allow workers to avoid the hottest parts of their day. This simple act of flexibility was estimated to have saved 40,000 businesses from closure. If you’re ready to take bigger steps, you could take a leaf out of Wyke Farms’ book by boosting local pollinators and building a reliable, in-house energy supply through solar panels or waste transformation. Another option, as recommended by McKinsey, is to build a backup inventory in supply chains to protect against potential interrupted production. Previously, this was an option only available to larger corporations. Now, thanks to increasingly affordable measurement capabilities, SMEs can target areas most likely to be at risk and concentrate their efforts there. Check out the CBI’s G17 Eco as a means of identifying at-risk areas of your business.

There’s an enormous elephant in the room when it comes to climate change adaptation. The best thing brands can do to reduce climate threats is to reduce their impact on the environment in the first place, focusing on areas like decarbonisation. The best form of defence is attack, and it’s never too late for your business to start taking action. Our MEASURE and soon-to-be released MITIGATE bases provide comprehensive lists of resources and partners to help your brand to take its first steps.

Climate risks are undoubtedly frightening. Yet businesses of all sizes are far from helpless and, as consistently emphasised by the IPCC, the time to act is now.

*Customers waiting in line after Hurricane Irma. Source: Getty Images*

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How strong community ethics are at the centre of Aduna Superfoods’ success.

Our Quick Take this week focuses on the risks posed to business from the climate crisis. But what about the human impact? The IPCC recently released a starkly-titled “Atlas of human suffering”, detailing the impacts the climate crisis will have on the most vulnerable populations in the world. If businesses are rooted in the community in which they operate, then those operating in these vulnerable communities have an even greater need to take action. Intertwined with the need to protect the business is the duty of care to the local community, and this is what makes Aduna Superfoods so special. They’ve leveraged community-focused ethics into a global presence, and it’s fantastic inspiration for brands.

‘Provenance’ (roughly, ‘where something comes from’) is becoming a real buzzword in the consumer goods industry, but all too many brands assume that simply stating where base ingredients originate from inherently carries ethical value. Aduna’s entire business operation centres on provenance. A genuine love for their natural ‘superfood’ ingredients, combined with the belief in the potential for business to positively impact communities, means both are protected and bolstered. How? By keeping supply chains short. Ingredients, such as baobab and Moringa, are always sought from small-scale producers. You can even find their stories here. Then, rather than shipping the raw ingredients for processing hundreds of miles away, Aduna employs nearly 500 women to process the fruits into powder. This means the community feels the full benefits, and the income goes directly into the hands of the women. The community, in turn, are incentivised to preserve their native species - the ingredients supercharging Aduna’s products. Incredibly simple, incredibly effective, truly sustainable.

As demand has grown, Aduna haven’t sought to intensify by creating vast mono-cultural farms. Instead, they’re creating new supply chains, investing in equipment and teaching farmers the skills they need to flourish. Aduna are investing in the long-term success of their business, their farmers and, crucially, the local environment. They’re currently working with conservation NGOs like Orgiis Ghana and the African Union to create the Great Green Wall, a movement to grow and preserve an 8,000km wall of trees across the Sahel. The aim is to “reverse desertification and climate change, provide food security and employment and prevent mass migration”. That’s undoubtedly an ambitious aim. But it’s also an enterprising one, and one that seems eminently doable for a brand that turned over £100,000 in their first year, and has been growing ever since. The message from Aduna is clear: to make a global brand, you don’t need a supply chain that’s spread across the world. By keeping supply chains short, not only can local communities and the environment benefit, but so too could your business.

Keen to get started?

Aduna exemplifies the principles laid out in the UN’s Race to Resilience. Following from the incredible Race to Zero initiative, the Race to Resilience is a global campaign to catalyse a global movement for climate resilience. By making the wellbeing of people and nature first, the idea is not just to create a world that copes with climate change, but one that thrives. Find out how to participate here.

Support Aduna via their shop:

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*Aduna’s bright and colourful products. Source: aduna.com*

> In case you missed it

🌱 We need to talk about Carbon Insetting.

Following the Footprints