Happy Monday!

This week we cover:

Carbon Pay: How your business can balance its carbon books
Umaro Foods: bringing home the seaweed bacon
In case you missed it: Employer-Supported Volunteering: A step by step guide to secure it, and our day at City Harvest London.

> Good News Last Week

🎯Terlingham Vineyard launch their limited edition Bacchus Gin in a 100% recycled gin bottle, and source their botanicals in partnership with Locavore Garden.

🎯Tony's Chocolonely announced as winner of The Stop Slavery Award 2022.
(catch more in our latest newsletter).

🎯VitroLabs Inc has been working with Kering (Gucci) to develop lab-grown cell-cultivated leather alternatives for the fashion industry.

🎯CLUBZERØ premiers a documentary in partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to tell their story of how they are leading the reuse movement across food packaging.

🎯Plant-based meat company Heura Foods launches ‘Good Rebel Tech,’ a sustainable platform to reduce food waste and extract more nutrients from plants.

⭐️John Lewis & Partners has partnered with The Energy Institute to deliver an education program to all employees on energy efficiency, reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions.

⭐️Lidl in Germany launches new refill station in partnership with Algramo for laundry detergent using innovative smart technology to register and remember bottles, saving consumers 10% on every use of the station.

⚡️B Corp UK/B Lab U.S. & Canada are celebrating 5000 certified companies, after the movement started 15 year ago. Now with companies in 79 countries, 154 industries, 400,000 workers.

> Click on each link to read more.

> Quick Take

Carbon Pay: How your business can balance its carbon books

More and more, people are looking at ways to calculate their own personal carbon footprint. This is also true for the workplace. As businesses begin to tackle their hefty Scope 3 emissions, teams are increasingly invested in calculating the emissions associated with day-to-day operations, like business travel. But this can be a bit of a minefield. What do you include? How do you accurately calculate? Do you reduce, or do you offset? So. Many. Questions.

This is where Carbon Pay comes in. Founded in 2021, with a pretty impressive portfolio of companies already including 1% for the planet, Carbon Pay takes the complexity out of tracking, calculating and reporting; for effective, measurable impact.

Climate Action with Carbon Pay. Source: carbonpay.io

Carbon Pay offers a range of payment cards that help make climate action simpler for everyone in their personal and professional lives. When you pay using your CarbonPay card, they help offset your carbon footprint. When it comes to businesses, for every £1 your team spends, they automatically offset 1kg of CO2 at no extra cost to your business. This means your carbon footprint is being offset, always. Not just for the train or plane you take, but the take-away coffee or dinner out too.

But that’s not all. Realistically, businesses endlessly offsetting carbon emissions will not solve the climate crisis. Businesses need to do all they can. When you get a card with Carbon Pay, you get a unique dashboard that tracks all your carbon emissions (powered by Ecolytiq to give the most accurate and localised data available) - and because every £1 is 1kg CO2e, you become not only carbon neutral, but that bit more too.

For businesses, this customisable dashboard gives you insight into spendings unlike anything else on the market - you can see individual people’s footprint (and spending), team carbon footprints, and even emissions by type (be it travel, accommodation or food). This gives businesses accurate, reliable and detailed data that you can then use to drive change and better habits, as well as reducing your company's Scope 3 emissions at the same time.

“There’s more to climate change than deforestation, so there must be more effective action than planting trees.” - Carbon Pay

Carbon Pay supports projects with proven climate action, something that’s all-too-rare with carbon offsetting schemes. Projects such as Climate Care, SeaTrees and carbon sequestering projects pioneered by Stripe are verified by ICROA, the global body that sets best practices for sustainable development projects. Investing in social projects in countries that are on the front line of the climate crisis, their environmental projects work to remove carbon from the atmosphere to have a global impact.

Having done the hard work for you, Carbon Pay make collective impact as positive as possible.

Want to learn more?

Make sure your offsets are responsible with ICROA’s comprehensive list of resources
Check out Carbon Pay
Keep on top of your business’ emissions using our MEASURE database

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> Brand Spotlight

Umaro Foods: how seaweed offers a different, all-natural approach to the plant-based protein market

The California-based start-up Umaro Foods was founded when two scientists, Beth Zoter and Amanda Stiles, came together to bring seaweed protein to the consumer market. Zoter’s experience researching seaweed as an energy source has combined well with Stiles’ experience in the plant-based dairy industry to create seaweed bacon. The plant-based bacon aims to deliver important nutrients lacking in some plant-based products, while still maintaining the famous ‘crunch’ of its meat counterpart.

The plant-based ‘meat’ market has boomed in recent years, growing to $2 billion in 2020, and is estimated to reach $5.3 billion by 2026. Other plant-based meat producers typically source their proteins from soybean or pea: which are sustainable alternatives to real meats, but ones that Umaro believes can be beaten on environmental impact.

Umaro’s proposition is a more sustainable alternative to these land-based proteins because:

Seaweed creates 5x the protein of soybean per acre
No land or freshwater is required to grow seaweed
No synthetic fertilizers are required to grow seaweed

Umaro made recent headlines as they pitched their product on Shark Tank, where they received an investment offer of $1 million from Mark Cuban. The start-up was praised for its product quality and innovation, showcasing that plant-based meat is an ever-evolving field for sustainable consumer goods. Umaro’s journey has been unique, as they found big investors before launching their product to the public. Umaro’s innovation hasn’t stopped yet, as its new facility is researching new ways to lower its product’s environmental impact. The seaweed bacon is expected to hit shelves and restaurant menus soon.

When it comes to innovation, other consumer goods brands can learn a lot from Umaro’s scientific approach. By working to receive a research grant from The Good Food Institute, Umaro was able to go beyond the norm and solve multiple consumer and environmental needs in one go. By pursuing this route, the company was able to maximize innovation in a rapidly growing category.

Interested? Read more about:

Umaro’s journey here
The impact of seaweed as a protein source here
The plant-based meat industry here.

Support Umaro Foods via their shop:

Umaro Foods

> In case you missed it

Employer-Supported Volunteering: A step by step guide to secure it, and our day at City Harvest London.

Following the Footprints

🌱 Carbon Pay: Turning your business expenses…