Introducing Minor Figures to DIFG: Carbon Neutral & BCORP journey
Delicious Ideas Food Group are excited to introduce Minor Figures range of cold brew Coffee and Tea cans to our growing product portfolio. Discover why these snacks are perfect for many businesses, especially gyms, hotels, cafés and more.
Introducing Minor Figures: Craig Jackson, National Account Manager
At Minor Figures, we want to drive action through optimism. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, illustrates this nicely: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
We make plant-based, 100% vegan products that lift your coffee and your mind – be that in the comfort of your home or in your favourite local spot. We organise parties with people we like and keep on launching new products that taste great, always pushing for the latest innovation and/or sustainability angle. We want to be a part of creating a new economy and redefine the way people perceive success. We believe purpose and profit go hand in hand.
This made us embark on two massive journeys, one to become Carbon Neutral, to balance out our environmental impact on the world, and one to become a B-Corp — probably the highest standard in social, environmental and governance practices.
Minor Figures journey to becoming Carbon Neutral: Thibaut Guenat, Sustainability Manager
We’ve now gone completely carbon neutral, meaning we not only reduce our carbon emissions anywhere we can, we also ‘offset’ them. Think of it like we work out what debt we owe to the environment and we pay it back through investing in projects that absorb or reduce the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
Throughout all the steps involved in producing Minor Figures products, CO2 is being emitted as a byproduct of burning fuel, using electricity, and the Minor Figures team coordinating all those efforts. Fortunately, Oat M*lk is more environmentally friendly to start with than dairy milk. By drinking Minor Figures over dairy, you’ve contributed to saving staggering amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, water from being wasted, and land from being used.
After analysing what contributes to carbon emissions in our supply chain and that of our suppliers, we’ve searched for ways to reduce our carbon footprint and launched our Oat Refill Station all over the UK that carries 42% less carbon impact and 56% less packaging use, and we’ve built a recycling scheme at the end so it’s truly a packaging-free solution that closes the loop as much as possible. This made us realise just how good localising to Australia would be for the planet, with -27% carbon reductions. But reductions take time so we also decided to have an impact now, by offsetting our emissions using Nature Based Solutions that use what nature gave us to sink some of the carbon in the air back into the ground, while also looking after the people that live on that land where the projects we invested are.
Going carbon neutral also enables us to set an internal price against the environmental impact new products, new regions, logistics routes will have as the company grows — a carbon tax for ourselves. The more we grow, the more our potential carbon output is. We want to get a jump start on both reducing our impact and measuring the financial impact of these reduction initiatives.
Minor Figures becoming BCORP certified: Thibaut Guenat, Sustainability Manager
We started preparing for B-Corp a month after calculating our carbon emissions for the entire business so we better understood the impact of our business and to find pathways to reduce our emissions. We chose to offset those emissions using Gold Standard carbon credits — which are as good as their name entails — via Climate Partner, the consultancy that verified our emissions. Going through this process helped us answer questions on the B-Corp Impact Assessment questionnaires.
But B-Corp is also focused on social impact as well as environmental sustainability. They inadvertently provided us a roadmap to becoming a better company. We had discussed some policies in the past but in the day-to-day running of the business we had not had the badnwith to progress all of them as a rapidly growing business but going through B-Corp created the opportunity we needed to move them forward. We worked through the list of all the policies, prioritising the low hanging fruit before tackling the more chunky ones. To help us through this process we hired the help of a young sustainability consultancy, called Ecofye, whose team helped us navigate the complexities, draft policies, and ensure we were doing things right. Our Articles of Association (rules for running the company) were also changed, committing the directors to consider the interests of employees, suppliers, customers, the community and the environment alongside the best interests of the members.
We worked on B-Corp for about two months and submitted in June 2020. And we weren’t the only ones. The pandemic seems to have been a wake-up call for many businesses and the number of B-Corp applications massively spiked. It used to take 6 months from start to finish. It now takes 6 months to get assigned an analyst to review your application. We’re 19 months in and closer than ever to get certified…
Final Thoughts from Minor Figures
We are doing the very best we can to leave the planet a better place than we found it. We’re big on talking about how minor changes can lead to big things, but we’re also all about ideas so big and ambitious that we can’t share them yet as you’d write us off as mad. We have huge goals for the future of Minor Figures, and we’re excited to take you along for the ride.
How can I get Minor Figures for my business?
Delicious Ideas Food Group supply snacks, confectionery and beverages including Minor Figures to thousands of sites around the UK. If you are a hotel, pub, café, co-working space, deli, farm shop and more, set up an account here and get wholesale deliciousness delivered to your site today!
If you have any questions or just want to find out a bit more about our service, get in touch with a member of our sales team today on 01733 239003.