🌱 Turning a commodity into a community: Citizens of Soil and raye the store.
Featuring The Collective UK, Dirtea, Bantu Chocolate and more...
Happy Monday!
This week we cover:
Citizens of Soil: How to turn a commodity into a community, featuring Sarah Vachon.
Saving a space for consumer goods SMEs: raye the store.
In case you missed it: 🚀 Launching: The ‘MEASURE’ Database
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> Good News Last Week
🎯 The Collective UK announced it’s dairy-free children’s yogurt pouches, expanding their plant based dairy portfolio.
🎯 Bedaffair announced they’ve certified as B Corp, scoring 85.2.
⭐️ Greggs announced it has sold 1 million ‘magic bags’ of food packed with goodies including sausage rolls and doughnuts via Too Good To Go, helping to keep more than 6,000 tonnes of food from going to waste.
⭐️ Morrisons opened a low environmental impact store in Essex, with 366 products being sold in ‘loose’ or refillable containers. It will operate on 43% less emissions than a standard one, and will also focus on locally sourced products as part of Morrisons’ Nation’s Local Foodmakers programme. They’ve also partnered with Too Good To Go on ‘Magic Bags’ – containing £10 worth of fruit, veg, deli and bakery products for £3.09 – to prevent food waste.
⭐️ ASDA announced it’s funding one of it’s own-brand vodka suppliers to facilitate the regeneration of local woodland, wet grassland and wildflower meadow at their Yorkshire vodka distillery.
⭐️ Costa Coffee and McDonald’s announced they’re joining forces to host 65 recycling points at 30 motorway service stations for disposable coffee cups. The cups will then be sent back through Costa’s stores, to specialist recycling facilities.
⚡️ Food redistribution by British food businesses increased by 16% to reach a record high in 2021, according to WRAP.
⚡️ The UK’s first plastic recycling park in Cheshire has been approved. The £165m park by Peel L&P Environmental extends beyond existing plans for a plastic to hydrogen plant also to be built at the site. Key facilities include a materials recycling facility, plastics recycling facilities, polymer laminate recycling facility and a hydrogen refuelling station.
> Click on each link to read more.
> Brand Spotlight
Citizens of Soil: How to turn a commodity into a community, featuring Sarah Vachon.
Turning a commodity into a community - easier said than done, right? For Sarah and Michael Vachon, it’s the founding mission for their brand Citizens of Soil. Setting out to support small holder farmers in Greece, they’re tackling an ‘industry fraught with issues, including a dangerous lack of transparency and anonymised mass production that strips out flavour, health benefits and dignity’. Now, Citizens of Soil are riding high on their latest over-funded fundraise (which was around half of investors identify as female!).
So, what does Citizens of Soil offer?
Delicious single estate, unfiltered harvest oil from small, independent farmers. They pay their farmers more, so that they can re-invest in their own land and continue to preserve the quality of their soil. Interested in the oil’s journey from farm to table? They’re working with Provenance to keep their supply chains transparent - click here to see.
Taking this mission of land regeneration to a new level, Citizens of Soil have also pledged 1% for the Planet, donating 1% of their sales to soil regeneration projects. Their first year saw their donation go to Kiss the Ground. They’ve also recently launched their Refill Scheme, partnering with TerraCycle to simply drop the pouches back in the post and write "FREEPOST SAVEOURSOIL" - and it’s all handled.
We spoke to Sarah Vachon, co-founder of Citizens of Soil, to ask her two key questions:
Q: Your motto is 'Turning a commodity into a community', and you've had a strong focus on supporting female farmers - why, and how have you achieved this?
Working with female producers wasn’t something we planned from the start, but it happened organically because our first grove happened to be owned by a woman—Maria Amargiotaki.
From working in sustainability and watching supply chains like those in coffee and wine, I knew that these supplier networks were dominated by men. And from my own experience at the mills in Crete and digging more into olive oil, I experienced this first-hand. As we started to look at the wider strategy for the business and working with small producers, working with women or groves that were at least 50% female became a focus.
We did think this would limit the pool of potential quality oils we could work with, but after going on sourcing trips to different regions across the Mediterranean, we realised that when we came with our checklist (female-led, regenerative practices, and specific quality markers of the oil itself), these producers often had all of this and more.
I’ve also been a part of Women in Olive Oil, which is a global network around the empowerment and education of women in the industry since before we even designed our brand, so I’ve been fortunate enough to have direct access to so many producers in the space.
Q: What's one key learning from building Citizens of Soil that you'd love to share with other brands, who perhaps are looking to create systemic change too?
I think it’s about realising that every single decision you make should fall in line with the problem you’re trying to solve as a business, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant the decision may be.
At Citizens of Soil, the problem we want to solve is similar to what we see in other kitchen staples like coffee or chocolate; extra virgin olive oil is a product that is overly commoditised. This means producers are squeezed, the environment suffers, and consumers only get access to blended oils that lack the freshness, flavour, and health benefits of extra virgin olive oil straight from the source.
So when our brand spends money, be it on something as important as our oil for customers or secondary as the envelopes we use on the B2B side, we see that decision as a vote we’re casting for how we want the world to be. It reflects our personal ethos, but is now a part of our brand’s and defines its overarching impact.
I always think about making a fully-transparent business, so if anyone could look at any part of it under a microscope, we would be confident to show those decisions.
Support Citizens of Soil via their shop:
> Quick Take
Saving a space for consumer goods SMEs: raye the store.
If you’ve strolled through Covent Garden recently you might have come across raye the store - a bright pink pop-up dedicated to emerging FMCG brands. From Citizens of Soil to The Simple Root, Dirtea to Bantu Chocolate, it’s a feast for the eyes and stomachs. For “Edition 03”, 104 food, drink and wellness brands have taken part, averaging 1-2 years old, each with a story and many with a purpose too.
We asked founder Nicole Compen her our 4 burning questions:
Why is it important to champion new and emerging brands in one space?
To elevate each other, and build brand awareness in a physical setting as it’s very difficult to stand out from the crowd online. Not to mention the challenge to acquire new customers virtually, especially when being a very new and niche product, using flavours that people might not be familiar with.
This is your third edition, how has your focus on sustainability evolved, and why?
We always aimed to work with conscious brands. Raye in itself is trying aiming to reuse and repurpose as much of the fit out as possible. In our latest edition we’ve build a bespoke space of which all will be repurposed.
How can other FMCG brands get involved in the future?
Reach out via nicole@weareraye.com and we can happily have a chat to learn more about your brand, products and aspirations.
What do you think is needed to better support emerging FMCG SMEs?
The link between discovery and activations. This is something we offer at raye, such as Sampling in-store, Taste & Review sessions & Panel Discussions and exposure to industry people such as investors & buyers.
Looking to visit raye? Find out more about opening hours and brands featured here - open until 31st July. You can also check out the event calendar. Following the Footprints team member Leone is moderating a panel about sustainability on Thursday 28th July at 7.30pm.
> In case you missed it
🚀 Launching: The ‘MEASURE’ Database
Need Help Navigating The Corporate Carbon Accounting Landscape? Read the Explainer.
> Follow up with…
Article: A More Sustainable Supply Chain
Podcast: Climate Cuisine
Book: Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet