Targeting renewable energy and recycled materials in the food industry

This is a sponsored article from SustainabilityTracker.com member South Australian Gourmet Food Company.

We all want to ensure that we are doing all we can to ensure our future generations survive. We have only one planet Earth and we need to be good stewards.

For far too long we have taken the planet for granted and chased profit over planet. But all of that is changing.

At the South Australian Gourmet Food Company, we have undertaken a number of measures to usher in a more sustainable future.

One measure is renewable energy. Our daytime production of our products on any regular sunny day, is powered by solar energy. Yes, we are literally using the power of the sun to produce our products.
Our Factory is located in Adelaide South Australia and anyone who knows Australia also knows that Australia as a continent is one of the driest continents on the planet, so water saving should be a key priority. We recognized this fact many years ago and we have taken steps in this regard.

We have updated our production technology in this regard and as well as recycling the water we use in production. We have decreased the water we previously used in production by up to 90%.

We have done this through new technology, using new updated production machinery which cost millions to install, but we believe the benefits outweigh the cost in the medium to long term.

We still have some other targets that we need to reach and one of them which is a current project we are working on is the pouches we produce need to be recyclable.

We have set ourselves a target that by January 2025 the pouches that we pack in our factory will be recyclable. Many pouch suppliers are currently working on single plastic pouches, that will be recycled. The problem with the current retort pouch packaging is that they have a number of laminated layers, thus making them difficult to recycle in current recycle operations.

We are working closely with packaging suppliers overseas and locally to source more sustainable retort pouch options and have already moved some way in this regard across other divisions of our company.
We have reduced our carbon footprint too, by sourcing our ingredients locally. Not only is that better for the planet, but we support local farmers too.

Supporting local farmers keeps jobs and money in Australia, and we believe that this is integral to the long term viability of Australia. If Covid has taught us anything it is that local manufacturing of essential and strategic industries is of the utmost importance. Nothing can be more strategic and essential than food, and food security.

We pack products for a number of other brands at our factory and we are working closely with them to evolve their businesses to a more sustainable future too.

Another action we can take is ensure that the packaging that we utilize to pack our products are made from recyclable materials. Where possible we will feed into this circular economy and we are vigilantly seeking packaging partners in this regard.

We are a signatory to the Australian Packaging Covenant (APCO) and we are proud to be actively engaged in progressing towards a more sustainable future.

This is an article from a SustainabilityTracker.com Member. The views and opinions we express here don’t necessarily reflect our organisation.