The Better Food Traders session enabled us to introduce the Better Food Traders accreditation, a new gold standard for ethical food retailers. Launched earlier this year, this mark allows customers to know that a whole raft of questions across the multiple pillars of sustainability, are being addressed by their retailer. Amy Shadbolt of Veg Box People, part of the Kindling Trust in Manchester, spoke about their ethical food enterprise why being a Better Food Trader has been really useful to their business – we facilitate peer-support, training and mentoring for our members too. We finished up with an interesting discussion ranging from whether prioritising buying ‘British’ feeds into the nationalist rhetoric that has led to Brexit, to what kind of standards Better Food Traders uses to ensure that retailers are only selling agroecologically grown produce.
We went away feeling that there was plenty of interest in the group in continuing the conversation about how to move our food shopping away from supermarkets towards smaller, ethical food retailers. Already, we’ve had one participant sign up to our Know Better Food peer-led training waiting list, and another who we are in touch with about their veg box business becoming a member of the Better Food Traders.
You can watch the recording of the session here.