🛒 The Check-Out: Ruby Harlow, Belazu.
+ more in our basket - Bag Balm, Manchester fashion & multi-purpose cleaners.
Happy Thursday! Welcome to our first edition of The Check-Out - your weekly dose of brand x sustainability inspiration, and your discovery box of what’s in our basket. It’s great to have you here.
To kick things off we’re sticking close to home. In the hot seat is the wonderful Ruby, who holds the prestigious title of 4th-Ever-Following-the-Footprints-Team-Member. Wielding a BA in Geography, for the last ~2 years Ruby has been at Belazu - first as a Sustainability Coordinator, now as Sustainability & Foundation Manager. Belazu create chef-grade ingredients, and if you haven’t yet tried their Rose Harissa then stop reading this and RUN don’t walk to your nearest condiment isle.
After we chat to Ruby, we’ll share what the Following the Footprints team has loved and consumed this week. Let’s dig in…
> Brand Spotlight
🎙️ Behind the Brand: 5 questions with Ruby Harlow, Sustainability and Foundation Manager at Belazu.
👉 Hello! We’d love the non-LinkedIn lowdown of who you are and what your role is.
I’m Ruby, passionate about all things food, nature & travel related. I spent a lot of time trying to connect these things together, writing geography essays on food supply chains & food waste. Now, I’m lucky to be the Sustainability & Foundation Manager at Belazu! My role involves everything from overseeing our operational footprint of our manufacturing site in West London to reducing our packaging impact, working with our supply chain and running the Belazu Foundation.
👉 Now for Belazu - tell us about your brand! How does Belazu think about impact? Any milestones you’re particularly proud of?
As a business, Belazu is built on sourcing quality ingredients from across the Mediterranean. With a large supply chain, our raw ingredients account for 71.6% of our carbon footprint. This year we invested in our fleet transition. We have three new EVs with one more on the way, and the remainder of the fleet now running on HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) which has a ~90% emission reduction.
We’ve also achieved a 49% food waste reduction against our baseline, based on the amount of food we manufacture onsite. Nearly hitting our WRAP target aligned with SDG 12.3. One initiative to achieve this was to implement a pig system on one of our production lines, saving over 8 tonnes of food waste per year.
👉 You’re also a Foundation Manager at the Belazu Foundation. Why is this separate to Belazu, how do they run in tandem and what’s the scope of your work here also?
Now in its 21st year, the Belazu Foundation runs alongside Belazu as a registered charity with its own mission and purpose: to support food and educational projects for children and families in UK and around the Mediterranean to promote education and healthy eating to inspire future generations.
The majority of Belazu’s community focus is centred around the Foundation. Last year 875 of the 1050 hours that the business committed to volunteering projects were spent with the Foundation. Having the business support the Foundation with volunteering days is a brilliant way for our workforce to support and engage with the projects, and it brings valuable benefits to the business too. Presenting to, and engaging with, children can be much trickier than the pitches some of my colleagues are used to!
Since 2003, Belazu has committed 3% of profits directly to the Foundation, and has also got behind some incredible fundraising projects too. During lockdown we held our first virtual banquet and yesterday we held our first live banquet, with five fantastic chefs cooking a nostalgic tasting menu to raise money for the fantastic partnerships that we support.
Our longest running partnership with the Zakoura Foundation has committed over £236,000 in 15 programmes to alleviate barriers to education in rural areas in Morocco, where we currently support the running of two schools in the Atlas Mountains. With School Food Matters, we run a Holiday Fun and Food Club at a school in our local community. Additionally, the annual Fresh Enterprise programme, designed to inspire children towards a career in the food industry, has reached 800 children over the previous 6 projects. Finally, with Chefs in Schools we help transform school food on plates - the stories from schools are so inspiring.
Children spend around 1,200 hours in school every year and many millions rely on school meals for vital nutrition. However, in the UK, the threshold of free school meal eligibility as a joint household income is less than £7,400 per year (for context, this is universal credit). Over 800,000 children are experiencing food poverty as they are not eligible. Against the backdrop of the cost-of-living crisis, each of these charities play such a vital role and we are incredibly proud to support their work.
👉 Ok, magic wand time; if we could grant you one wish for the food industry, what would it be?
I would eradicate food waste! One third of all food produced globally is wasted, across all levels of the supply chain. I find this baffling, from the amount of resources that are wasted in producing it in the first place (water, land use, energy…), to the lack of value placed on food with producers not being paid fairly and the emissions that arise from food waste not being disposed of correctly.
With the increase in climate related risk impacting our harvests, Belazu have seen this happen specifically over the last couple of years - we need to place a higher value on food. Having spent a lot of time in the warehouse with our friends at City Harvest, seeing the scale of this waste come through from farms, manufacturers, brands and retailers is eye opening to say the least.
Project Drawdown has now placed food waste reduction as number 1 on their list for tackling the climate crisis. With some effort and innovation, the food industry needs to come together to achieve this.
👉 Finally - We’d love some recommendations; one climate-related resource, one person to follow online and one consumer brand that’s killing it (maybe we’ll chat to them next…).
If you’re not following Doug McMaster or Silo then you’re missing out! They recently achieved the Triple Green Awards in the 360°Eat Guide and I’m in awe. A meal at Silo is an experience.
Having just written our latest Sustainability Report, I’m in awe of the detail that Vivobarefoot put into their report. I also spoke to them recently about their B Corp recertification too (ours is coming up towards the end of this year) as they got a huge score in their recert!
A huge thanks to Ruby for taking the time to chat with us!
> In Our Basket
🔎 What we loved and consumed this week:
From Jenny in New York: Even though it’s technically spring, NY is in the thick of “fool’s spring” with some unpleasant weather and cold days. Bag Balm, a product that was originally created in 1899 to sooth dairy cow udders, has been essential for soothing my own dry hands — I’ve been using the same tin for an embarrassing number of years.
From Laura in Manchester: I love the idea of buying Manchester-made fashion. I was a long time lurker before taking the plunge and getting this handy half-moon bag from WAWWA. Aside from the look, I was impressed that they shared their products' carbon footprint and that all workers are paid a Real Living Wage.
From Indira in Glasgow: I just bought another concentrated refill for multi-purpose cleaner from neat. They have a beautiful refillable aluminium bottle spray that you can reuse lots of times — I have been reusing mine for two years now! They smell amazing and very easy to use.
That’s it for today!
Know a brand we should spotlight next? Let Leone know!
Have links that can make the team learn or laugh? Share them with us, we might just share them in The Check-Out next week.
Hungry for more? You’ll see us on Monday! That’s when we suit up and get serious, digging into a topic that is guaranteed to make you look smart at standup.
Much love,
Team FTF