The news comes after Iceland made an announcement last week to eliminate plastic packaging from its own-brand products by 2023.
Gourmet pastry
Cranswick’s portfolio includes predominantly fresh products ranging from fresh pork, gourmet sausage and bacon to premium cooked meats, charcuterie meats and gourmet pastry.
“The environmental impact of plastics, with regards to the damage they cause to the world’s oceans and landfill, has become a major global issue and one that we seek to address as a matter of urgency,” said Adam Couch, CEO, Cranswick.
“While we commend the [UK] government for putting this issue on the political agenda through the 25 Year Environmental Plan, we believe we have a responsibility to drive systemic change to end global plastic pollution.
“More importantly, nor do we need to wait that long (2042) to achieve our goals. Ensuring a sustainable future for our planet should be a priority for every retailer, manufacturer, local authority and individual globally – and it is our collective responsibility to ensure there is the opportunity to be able to reduce, re-use and recycle as much as is possible to minimise the impact on our environment.”
The manufacturer says, as well as reducing its plastic use by 50% by 2025, all packaging used by the food group will be 100% recyclable and sustainably sourced.
Lobby government
It has also launched a call to action with an invitation to food peers, customers and suppliers to collaborate as a matter of urgency.
The company recently signed the Courtauld Commitment 2025, a 10-year voluntary agreement bringing together organisations from across the food chain to reduce the environmental impact of food and drink.
This follows its recent external commitment to support the Champions 12.3 initiative, whereby it pledged alignment to a UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to reduce global food waste by 50% by 2030.
It says the next step is to lobby the government to look at the full lifecycle of products and not simply collect materials for recycling, but ‘get our waste packaging back in the system to replace virgin materials for manufacturing new products’.
Cranswick 2025 commitments
- All packaging used by the food group will be 100% recyclable and sustainably sourced.
- Where dual materials are required to maintain product quality and minimise food waste, these will only be from materials that are also 100% recyclable and sustainably sourced.
- All packaging will be designed to be intuitively recycled by the consumer and easily recovered through household recycling collections.
- It will be forming a new industry stakeholder group to openly collaborate on developing circularity in the UK to ensure it has a workable closed-loop system.
- It will test new initiatives to drive positive consumer behavior around recycling food packaging to make this as simple as possible, and publicly share findings.