Sorting the surplus: our environmental footprint.
Happy Earth Month! Every year, April has been recognised as the month to be mindful of ways we can help planet Earth and as we start to see signs of spring creeping in, now is the perfect time to reflect on what we at Birds are doing to help.
Earth Day, part of Earth Month which has been celebrated on 22nd April every year since 1970, is a call to raise awareness of environmental and sustainability issues around the world and is now recognised as the planet’s largest civic event each year.
It’s becoming increasingly important to be aware of the impact we are having on our planet, especially as a food producer. We are taking lots of steps towards this by looking at things like our packaging, how much waste we are generating, making sure our ingredients are sustainable and where our energy comes from - all of the elements which can contribute to our carbon footprint.
Sustainability has rightly become a huge topic of conversation in recent years and within the baking world, more and more businesses are rightly looking towards keeping their ingredients local, managing their waste and where their energy is coming from.
Here at Birds, we have various initiatives in place to help make us more green. These include working with food banks to donate surplus food, using locally sourced ingredients and switching to renewable energy sources where we can.
Doughnuts into donations
We're dedicated to ensuring there's an ample supply of our delicious sweet and savoury offerings for all our customers. We never want anyone to leave our stores empty-handed but occasionally this means that we have a little extra left at the end of the day. Rather than seeing it as waste we use our initiatives to share the surplus with the community so that our products don’t go to waste.
We have a few brilliant initiatives which we run across many of our stores including being a part of the brilliant Too Good To Go app, and partnering with local food banks.
To Good To Go is a service which connects our customers through an app to Birds stores which have surplus food at the end of the day. In last 12 months, we have saved 62,706 meals saved and 170 tonnes CO2 saved. If you live local to one of our stores and want to help combat food waste then all you need to do to get your hands on some Birds treats, is download the app, purchase one of the ‘Surprise Bags’ for just a third of the price from your local store and pop down to collect it. We’ve seen some happy faces when they realise their favourite filled roll or caramel doughnut is waiting for them. Our bags are in high demand, so you have to be quick!
We also work with local food banks who collect left-over produce from our stores every day including Doorways Derby, StreetSafe and Notts Walker.
When baked goods do good
When looking at what we can do as a bakery to help the environment, we really wanted to focus on where we are sourcing ingredients from and where our energy comes from (if only we could use our bakers, butchers and chocolatiers enthusiasm to fuel it!)
Our teams have been hard at work looking into renewable energy sources to help power our machines that aid our creations.
Our ingredients are also just round the corner. Our milk, a staple ingredient in many of our products such as our milk custards, comes from a dairy in Duffield, Derbyshire, as does our butter; our cream from Staffordshire; and the strawberries that fill our jam doughnuts from Nottinghamshire. We can practically smell the sweetness in the air!
Keeping the planet happy is just as important to us as keeping our customers happy. At Birds we are always looking for ways to improve not only our products, but the footprint we are leaving when making them.
We wish you a happy Earth Month and we encourage you to have a think about how you can help the planet – and why not tuck into one of our locally sourced treats while you’re doing it!
Find out more about our story, our philosophy and our producers online at www.birdsbakery.com/pages/our-story, and to browse our ranges click here.