Championing sustainable decisions for innovative food brands
City Harvest B-Corp partner, YF, champions a network of innovative food brands and connects them with investors, retailers, and charities like City Harvest: a conduit to help them do good for people, and the planet.
Innovative food brands have sustainability at their core, with measures in place from the onset to improve their social and environmental impact whilst being a commercially successful FMCG brand.
This B-Corp Month, we caught up with Giles Moody, Head of Data & Technology at YF and City Harvest’s Food Council member.
Giles tells us why YF partners with City Harvest, and how its community of high-growth and innovative FMCG brands can find a solution to surplus with City Harvest.
At YF, we work with innovative FMCG brands, help them to scale, and work with retailers and investors. We are a mission-led business, and we want to be working with brands that put purpose over profit. YF doesn’t actually produce products, but we work with hundreds of young, innovative brands. We help to promote what City Harvest does as a solution for them to put their surplus food to good use.
Working with City Harvest allows us to:
- Execute our mission and make a better world
- Pave the way and empower the brands within our ecosystem to do the same
Why innovative food brands should work with City Harvest
City Harvest is an easy solution to surplus food. We’ve worked with a number of brands that donate to local charities, and one week they find they need the food, another week they don’t, or already have too much. So, City Harvest is basically the conduit for the industry.
With City Harvest, you can send your food surplus to one destination. If your warehouse has other brands looking to give their surplus, then that stock can be combined for collection. So, it’s a very logistically-efficient solution. Most importantly, you know it’s going to end up in a good place because you can trust the work that City Harvest does directly with its charity partners.
It’s also a great way for brands to demonstrate to their own customers that they’re more than just their words. In redistributing surplus, they’re actually living up to their values, and finding a great home for their surplus food.
City Harvest helps high-growth brands on their B-Corp journeys
YF became a B-Corp last year, and it’s been a journey. The certification helps us reflect on areas we could improve, and other initiatives that we can implement to further live the values of our mission-led business.
Brands can definitely benefit from working with City Harvest on their B-Corp journey, and on achieving that accreditation. B-Corp is essentially a scoring system, but it’s really about showing that your actions are more than just your branding and words.
Working with City Harvest easily solves the problem of having surplus food, and ensures it’s not wasted. There are lots of brands that we know that are already working with City Harvest, like Brave, Dalston’s, and more. It’s awesome to go to the City Harvest warehouse and see their packaging dotted all over the place.
There is always more that brands in our network can do. So, we make sure that when they’re looking for this sort of solution, we point them to the likes of City Harvest.
Got Surplus?
If you’re a food business looking to sustainably redistribute your industry surplus, get in touch with City Harvest’s food team. We can help to solve surplus issues from anywhere in your supply chain.
