Real Bread Campaign signs as a Courtauld 2025 Engagement Partner
With its new No Loaf Lost guide due for publication in January 2018, the Real Bread Campaign is playing a role in a collective effort to make food and drink production and consumption more sustainable.
As part of the Real Bread Campaign’s overall mission to find and share ways to make bread better for us, better for communities and better for the planet, it is working to encourage and help bakeries reduce loaf surplus and waste. The next step will be publishing a guide for SME bakeries in mid-January that focuses on how to cut the amount of surplus they create.
This work is in line with the Courtauld 2025 shared ambition ‘to cut the resource needed to provide food and drink by a fifth in ten years’ from 2015 to 2025, which the WRAP website notes includes a 20% reduction in food and drink waste, a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas intensity and a reduction in impact associated with water use in the supply chain.
The Real Bread Campaign co-ordinator will sit on WRAP’s Your Business is Food manufacturing focus group and report annually to WRAP, including on the work done to promote changes in line with the collective Courtauld 2025 ambition and number of businesses reached.
The Real Bread Campaign is part of the food and farming charity Sustain, which states:
Sustain supports effective measures to reduce food surplus, direct unavoidable food surplus to useful purposes and ensure that as little food waste as possible ends up in landfill. As such, Sustain is supportive of WRAP’s work and recognises that voluntary initiatives can create knowledge, examples of good practice and start to build momentum towards societal and legislative change.
Such is the seriousness and scale of food waste, however, that Sustain does not believe voluntary agreements alone are enough to tackle the problem. Robust legislation is a key element in creating a level playing field on which all stakeholders (including businesses, government, local authorities and consumers) can work to build a better, low-input, circular, stable and truly sustainable food system. A range of effective legislative action would change the rules within which food producers, manufacturers, retailers and foodservice companies manage food and supply chains, encouraging collaboration and treating waste as a pre-competitive issue. This would include meaningful, legally-binding and suitably enforced waste reduction targets and assigned responsibilities, as well as reporting requirements to track progress over time.
Real Bread bakery owners (and everyone else) interested in news of No Loaf Lost and the rest of the Real Bread Campaign’s work, are encouraged to join the Campaign to support its work, or sign up for free updates.
www.wrap.org.uk/content/courtauld-commitment-2025
Published Tuesday 5 December 2017
Real Bread Campaign: The Real Bread Campaign finds and shares ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet. Whether your interest is local food, community-focussed small enterprises, honest labelling, therapeutic baking, or simply tasty toast, everyone is invited to become a Campaign supporter.
