We’ve been vegan since the 90’s, with more than a little history in the animal rights movement, so our vegan ethics are pretty ingrained!
Reduce, re-use, recycle has always been our mantra. We recycle everything we can, it’s like a full-time job!
When it comes to sourcing ingredients and other materials, we do our utmost to minimise our impact, but it’s hard sometimes, we can’t be ‘perfect’. The palm oil used in the margarine we use is from RSPO certified segregated crops, and the chocolate we use is Rainforest Alliance certified and 100% vegan (with no possible cross contamination!), and we’re even listed as an ethical chocolate/confectionery company on the Food Empowerment Project’s list of trusted chocolate companies.
Now we’re not going to spend months developing a 40 page ethical policy document for Ethical Consumer, we’re too busy getting on with doing the right thing! As a couple of old-school vegans who’ve been around the block a bit, and done it all, we know what we’re doing, we don’t need to prove that to some other company!
When it comes to some of our ingredients, we know that palm is a problematic ingredient, and it’s used in the margarine we use in all our toffees and caramels, but we don’t have a problem with that, palm oil is actually very close in structure to dairy fat (butter), and helps our products have the same kind of chew as the dairy-based confections. Palm is also a really high yield crop compared to any other plant oil crop (like coconut), and we don’t much of an issue with palm being used for (vegan) food products, it’s everything else it’s used for that’s a problem!
Then there’s the topic of plastic packaging! The man who developed the first plastic carrier bag did so because he wanted to put a stop to all the deforestation, the felling of millions of trees used for their pulp to make paper bags and boxes. That’s fascinating! When we moved into our first little factory and got a wrapping machine, we did so with the intention of using plastic-free film, but the more we investigated, the more complicated the facts about compostable plastic-free packaging got, and it wasn’t looking so ‘planet-friendly’ anymore. These films still have some plastic in them, they’re made from Eucalyptus pulp, a tree (mono)crop just as responsible for deforestation as the likes of palm, and with an even bigger carbon footprint than its plastic equivalent. There’s a lot of greenwashing going on in this industry, it’s quite ugly!
Then there’s the small matter of what these compostable films can actually be used for, and for high fat products like ours, they’re not that suitable, as their barrier qualities and seal strength are so low that we were warned by some in the packaging industry that it would shorten our products’ shelf life too much, and they were right! We ran some trials a few years ago and found our shelf life decimated! Completely unusable for us. It’s beyond us to create the perfect packaging film, but the packaging industry really needs to pull its socks up on this one, but they’re not, not yet.
I you want to read my ‘grumble’ page about ‘environmentally-friendly’ packaging, read on… https://jeavonstoffee.com/about-our-packaging/