🌱 One step further: How Drop Bear Beer Co are investing beyond carbon neutral, and 4 steps to employee engagement with Do Nation.
Featuring Pukka Herbs, Ella's Kitchen, Meatless Farm and more...
Happy Monday!
This week we cover:
Quick Take: Inspire employee climate action in 4 steps with Do Nation.
Brand Spotlight: Drop Bear Beer Co.: Investing beyond carbon neutral via a ‘green brewery’.
In case you missed it: 🤝#4 - Meet the Partners: Altruistiq, featuring Saif Hameed, CEO and Founder.
> Good News Last Week
🎯 Meatless Farm announced it is introducing eco-labelling to their core product range in partnership with Foundation Earth. The changes will take place from this month onwards, and will follow a traffic light labelling system.
🎯 Abel & Cole announced they’re working with Foundation Earth to launch eco-labelling across a selection of their fruit & veg online. This follows their work with Mondra to collect data on over 85 crops
🎯 Petersham Nurseries announced they will be using ecoSPIRITS for all their house lines and cocktails. Cocktails will include Portobello Road Distillery, Black Cow Vodka, Destileria Serralles,Inc. FAIR. Avallen Spirits, Widges Gin, Tried & True Vodka too.
⭐️ Molson Coors Beverage Company has announced that it is moving its Fort Worth brewery to wind-powered, 100% renewable electricity this month, having signed a deal with EDF Energy Services to receive approximately 72,000 megawatts of power.
⭐️ Sainsbury’s announced it’s completed a trial with Electra Commercial Vehicles on a refrigerated hydrogen-powered truck, as part of the UK government-funded ‘Road to Hydrogen’ scheme. The truck emitted zero emissions versus an average of 314kg of CO2 per day by a diesel truck making the same trial trip.
⭐️ Asda announced it is replacing use by dates on its own-brand yoghurts with best before dates, aiming to help customers combat food waste at home.
⭐️ Danone announced a strategy to reduce their absolute methane emissions from fresh milk supply chain by 30% by 2030. They expect to eliminate 1.2 billion tons CO2e of methane emissions by the end of the decade, and have already reduced their methane emissions by ~14% between 2018 and 2020
⚡️WWF launched the Biodiversity Risk Filter (BRF), a new tool designed to help firms explore biodiversity-related risks. This is available via the WWF Risk Filter Suite platform.
> Click on each link to read more.
> Quick Take
Inspire employee climate action in 4 steps with Do Nation.
While an estimated 93% of businesses are not delivering on their sustainability plans, Do Nation exists to connect your employee resolutions to your organisation’s sustainability goals. Founded in 2010, Do Nation has an impressive portfolio of FMCG brands who have enlisted the programme to inspire and track employee pledges (see their case studies here). While people are inspired to start the year with Dry January, Veganuary and setting New Year’s resolutions for 2023, now is the perfect time to set goals which improve their health and wellbeing and have a positive environmental impact.
Small actions can make a big difference: let’s dig in to how it works in 4 steps...
1. Pick an action
With a wide variety of pledges to choose from, there is something for everyone. From reducing food waste, washing clothes at 30C, reducing junk emails, using a saucepan lid to draught-proofing your home, reading more to expand your mind and driving more smoothly.
2. Run a campaign
Once employees have selected an action, they join your organisation's campaign. Inspire healthy competition by pitting teams against each other and setting up a leaderboard.
3. Keep at it
Do Nation continues to support and inspire your employees for the next couple of months with frequent tips and reminders, helping them to crack new habits and close the intention-action gap. This keeps momentum rolling and continues collective action in your company.
Example: As part of their campaign, Ella’s Kitchen chose new actions for employees to choose from as part of their campaign every quarter.
4. Report back
After the 2 months, employees report back to say how they got on. The team impact is calculated into a tangible impact e.g. how many times driving around the world or bananas worth. Rewarding employees for their action helps to inspire more pledges, such as Ella’s Kitchen donating a food pouch to a child through Action against Hunger or sustainable, recycled prizes at Pret.
Example: Stepping it up a notch, Pukka Herbs linked their Do Nation pledges to their employee bonus scheme, with employees receiving an extra 0.5% bonus for reaching a target of saving 500,000 cups of tea worth of carbon.
So, how effective really is it?
Pukka tea found that 77% pledges were completed and Pret found that 95% of employees who made pledges increased their awareness of Pret’s sustainability work. In 2021, the average “Doer” reduced their carbon footprint by 8.4% and saved 1 tonne of CO2e choosing high impact pledges like reducing meat intake and reducing food waste. In 4 simple steps, your brand could see similar results too.
> Brand Spotlight
Drop Bear Beer Co.: Investing beyond carbon neutral via a ‘green brewery’.
One in seven Brits are participating in Dry January this year. So, it’s no surprise that alcohol free beer is on the rise across the UK. As the UK’s top rated zero-alcohol brewery, the 2019 founded Drop Bear Beer Co. is a poster child for this surge. Already gracing the shelves of Co-op and Ocado, how are this Welsh B-Corp sustaining their success? By investing in the future and seeing ‘carbon neutral’ as the beginning, not the end. Let’s take a closer look.
In 2022, Drop Bear Beer became the world’s first carbon neutral alcohol-free brewer. It’s a great headline, but one which the team is conscious not to make their legacy. The Swansea-founded brand has made no secret of the fact that, ‘as a first step’, they neutralise emissions using offsetting - but that’s not where their work ends.
“Now comes the time for real innovation as we work to reduce our carbon footprint at production stage and reduce reliance on carbon offsetting.”
Let’s dig into how…
Working with Climate Partner, Drop Bear accounts for Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions (here’s a reminder of what that means) which are partly offset via VSC-accredited schemes. This includes investment in wind energy farms in Brazil which connects directly to the Brazilian Interconnected System. Crucially, this mitigates emissions (over 66 tonnes CO2e so far) that would have occurred without the project, making the scheme additional.
Through the brewery’s connection with the TreeClicks app, a tree is planted for every purchase. Together with a monthly employee contribution, this has resulted in over 1,800 trees planted so far. You can learn more about Drop Bear’s offsetting projects here, with customers afforded on-demand information through QR codes provided on packaging.
Investing in innovation:
Stage two of their sustainability plan is to build the world’s first carbon neutral alcohol-free brewery in Abergavenny. Constructed by pioneering engineers AMRC Cymru, heat exchange and steam recapture technology will be implemented to reduce energy use and turn waste into renewable energy via anaerobic digestion. Meanwhile, real-time analysis allows constant monitoring of performance.
This ‘green brewery’ (supported by a £92,000 grant from the Welsh Government’s Decarbonisation Fund) is designed to allow Drop Bear to ‘identify where the most impactful changes can be made’ and physically facilitate these changes through innovative technology. Funded by a huge £1.9m equity investment, this brewery is a great example of how to use company growth to turbo-charge sustainability credentials.
Building on solid foundations:
Money hasn’t changed Drop Bear. This investment has only allowed the brand to build on all the positive steps they’ve already taken. The team use a fully renewable fleet of vehicles, have a paperless office and even craft merch using a fully closed-loop system. In 2021, they took the step to switch from bottles to cans, reducing overall resource consumption (though make sure you check out an interesting debate on this).
In their first two years, Drop Bear earned an incredible 650% growth in sales. The reinvestment of this growth into bolstering their sustainability efforts just goes to show what a priority this is (and should be) for brands - especially as Drop Bear were named Green Startup of the Year at the Wales Startup Awards.
Take a closer look at Drop Bear Beer:
> In case you missed it
🤝#4 - Meet the Partners: Altruistiq
MEASURE DATABASE - Featuring Saif Hameed, CEO and Founder.
> Follow up with…
Article: Climate 101 — A Cheat Sheet of the Latest Climate Science
Podcast: IKEA: Making a $40 Billion Company Climate Positive
Company: Planetgroups
Event: The Greenprint; employee engagement in 2023 - 1st February