protecting our playground

Our main mission at Ella’s Kitchen is to get more children eating more healthily. But if we can do our little bit to help the environment along the way, that seems like a good idea to us. We’re starting out with small steps but hope, over time, to do even more to give back to the planet we all live on.

Ella's Barn

Now that we’ve moved into our lovely new barn, we’re looking at making ourselves as ‘green’ as we can. This includes the electricity we use, the recycled paper we print on, buying as many eco products as we can to use around the office and separating and recycling our rubbish. We’re re-using Sarah’s old sofas and Nicole’s kitchen table and chairs and, best of all, we’re re-using an old farm building as our offices. We’re actually all sitting in what used to be ‘The Shippon’  - the cow shed! Not many cows around now but we do have Amos, the farm horse, who pops his head over the stable door most mornings snuffling for a carrot.

 

Amos the horse at Ella's Kitchen Organic Baby Food HQ 

We’ve also been working with our local arboriculturalist (what a big word!) to plant some native British trees to protect and enhance the lovely countryside surrounding Ella’s Barn.

Packaging

Did you know that all our cardboard outer packaging used for our Smoothie Fruit boxes is 100% recyclable – and, in fact, is 90% recycled card itself? And we use vegetable inks and water coatings to print the boxes. We’re also really proud that our printing plates are all chemical free!

Our baby food pouches use 80% less materials than many alternative forms of packaging. An independent audit of the life cycle of our pouches has shown that the energy used and the environmental impact made when making, transporting and destroying them is significantly less than PET plastic bottles, tetra packs and glass. Would you believe that less than 5% of the environmental impact of packaging is to be found in the final disposal stage? More than 95% of the ecological damage comes from the energy used in the package manufacturing and delivery process. So, the lightest packaging is generally best for the environment.

As the final part of the process, we have also been busy researching possible solutions to the recycling question and investigating a number of proactive solutions for recycling and/or reusing our pouches. That's why we've teamed up with eco-friendly TerraCycle to help provide another use for our pouches through upcyclying. Find out more about TerraCycle and how to get involved here! Also, our ‘Grow and Win’ on-pack competition encouraged kids to re-use our pouches as little plant pots to grow the herb seeds in that we gave away.

TerraCycle used in our babyfood packaging

Helping each other

We’re working with all our suppliers to look at how ‘green’ they are and the ways in which we can all look to ‘protect our playground’ and reduce our carbon footprint. There’s some great initiatives already in place and more being worked on, for instance...

The boxes our stage 1 and stage 2 products are packaged in have been reduced in size saving over 6 tons of packaging material per year.

We are also moving to lower weight material (accredited by the clever people at FSC) which will give us a further reduction in weight of 15 tons per year!
Ella