We’re trying hard to reduce the amount of packaging we generate as a business.
For the past six years we’ve been giving a discount at the deli each time you bring your own pot, this has generated a decent re-use rate, currently equating to about 20% of total salad and olive sales. Good effort everyone!!
To try and increase this (we’re hoping for 40% by the end of the year), we’re changing the way we price our salads, dips and olives. From the second week of August, the cost of the tub will no longer be included in the sale price. The price per weight will be reduced, and instead you’ll pay 17p on top of that for each new tub/box you need (increased to 18p in 2019). You can avoid this by bringing in your own containers…of any kind, as long as they are fit for purpose, clean and dry.
This is not a penalty!
We all know how hard it is to remember to bring our pots in at the right time, and most of us don’t plan all our deli purchases in advance. So in most cases you won’t actually be paying any more then you were before, and in some cases it’ll be a few pence less. (Please ask if you’d like to see a breakdown of the way we’ve generated these adjusted prices.)
What we do hope to do though, is to make packaging less of an inevitability. Over time, we hope that pricing this way will be part of a move towards all of us seeing packaging as something of value, an actual purchase, a thing we need to make a conscious decision about whether to use or not, rather than it being an inevitable implication of buying something from the deli. A bit like the national plastic bag charge has done for bags.
Other organisations who’ve adopted this approach have seen huge jumps in re-use rates – watch the BBC ‘World Hacks’ video about what happened when a university campus switched from a coffee cup discount to a charge.
Please talk to us if you have any questions, concerns, or ideas for improving the scheme.
Happy re-using!
Please Note
- Customers are solely responsible for cleaning and sterilising their containers at home before using them for refill at our store.
- To reduce risk of cross contamination, we won’t be able to accept tubs that aren’t clean and dry.
- Once the product is dispensed into a customer’s own container it can’t be placed back on sale.
