Our commitment to the community and the environment

Our passion for food extends to a real concern about where our food comes from and the environmental impact we have. We continue to strive to reduce our carbon footprint and make a positive social impact in our local communities.

We are thrilled to have won Green Business of the Year and the 2010 London Business Awards.

Crouch End Festival Chorus – a world-class symphony choir on our doorstep

We are proud to support the Crouch End Festival Chorus – a local choir with local singers, still firmly based here in North London, but with a national reputation. Now widely regarded as one of the UK’s top symphonic choirs, the choir had humble beginnings – local enthusiasts leafletting outside our store looking for singers for Verdi’s Requiem.

Almost 30 years later and the choir of 150 performs regularly at London’s top classical music venues and with world-class orchestras. In the last 18 months, the choir has broadcast live on Radio 3 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, opened the 2010 Proms with Mahler’s 8th Symphony and performed a range of concerts at the Barbican.

The choir is not just about classical music – it is also known for its versatility and in recent months has sung with Noel Gallagher at the Royal Albert Hall, joined long-time collaborator Ray Davies for the last night of his Meltdown Festival and performed live with dance act Basement Jaxx. In October 2011 CEFC was simultaneously at number 1 in the pop album charts, on Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, and at number 5 in the Classical Charts, on Katherine Jenkins’ latest album, Daydream.

All the singers are volunteers, most of them live in North London and all are passionate about singing and choral music – and delighted to be carrying the name of Crouch End into concert halls and recording studios.

Find out more about Crouch End Festival Chorus here where you can also buy their CDs in their music shop.

The Ecocide Trial

We are proud to have sponsored the Ecocide trial.

Why? For a more sustainable world, there needs to be consequences for the damage that is being done to the planet.

Stall4All

We are delighted to offer a brand new Community Market Stall in collaboration with Stall4All.

The Stall4All is a unique opportunity for local producers and makers of food and crafts to connect with, and sell their products directly to the local community.

For further information or to make a booking please click here

Community Hub

We now have a Community Hub area inside the Crouch End store where local projects and organisations can ‘tell their story’ to our customers.

For further information or to make a booking please click here

Food from the Sky

We are totally committed to soucing locally and the ultimate local product is Food from the Sky, grown on the worlds first supermarket roof garden, on our Crouch End store.

Food from the Sky is a collaboration between Thornton’s Budgens, The Positive Earth Project (a local social enterprise) and the local community. The project is a non for profit venture with all proceeds from sale of products being sunk back into the project and is designed to inspire our community and a wider audience on the possibilities for urban food growing at a time when London needs to grow considerably more food and therefore lower our carbon footprint.

The growing and harvesting is undertaken by a team of volunteers from Crouch End and goes on sale in the store every Friday.

Food from the Sky is a vision for the future and our aim is to produce a template that can be used by others to replicate the idea. We are inundated in interest from around the country and indeed from all corners of the world!

The roof is also now an educational centre with childern and adults learning about Urban food growing. Over 650 children will have food growing lesson on the roof this year and the ‘seed2seed’ programme for adults is well underway.

We were thrilled that Food from the Sky won the Community Award at recent PEA Awards in London.

For more information on Food from the Sky, please click here.

Pennies for Plastic

Every time someone doesn’t use a plastic bag, we donate a penny to a local charity or organisation. Since we launched our Pennies for Plastic scheme, we’ve managed to prevent over 9 million plastic bags going into landfill. At the same time, we have raised £100,000 for local charities and organisations on the way. Pennies for Plastic has now been launched formally as a Trust Fund. For more details, please click here.

Green Energy

Thornton’s Budgens signed a two year contract for Green Energy. This means that all all our power will come from Renewable sources.

Thanks to our monitoring equipment, having reduced our usage by just under 10% in 2010 (and thereby hitting our 10:10 target), our target saving for 2011 is 17.8%. As part of this, we’ll be investing £30,000 in putting doors on all our open chillers in Crouch End. This will make a significant reduction in our carbon footprint; the added side benefit – our first aisle won’t feel like the Artic anymore!

Simon Community

As part of our policy to give away as much of our surplus food (others call it waste!) as possible, we work with the Simon Community in Kentish Town to ensure that all usable food surpluses from Belsize Park are used to feed the homeless at their local shelter.

In Crouch End, our food surpluses are provided to the Food Cycle kitchen in Stroud Green and Noels Kitchen in Wood Green.

Local Suppliers

Our local supplier policy means that we now stock over 1,500 lines produced within 100 miles of the store. These come from over 50 small independent suppliers, many in our own London boroughs, massively reducing the food miles on these products.

We continue to support British Farmers, stocking their fruit and vegtables where we can.

Fairtrade

At Thornton’s Budgens, we are very keen to promote a more sustainable future for the food industry. As part of this, we are very keen to stock fair-trade products and have as wide a range as we can. Some of these are mainstream such as Bananas or major brands, whereas others are from our smaller producers like Paddy and Scott’s, the Suffolk coffee supplier.

For more information on the ethos of Fairtrade, click here

Sustainable Fishing Policy

In launching our Sustainable Fishing policy, we have eliminated all products that are rated 5 by the Marine Conservation society (ie those species in the most danger). We are also communicating the ratings of all our fish to customers, so that everyone can clearly understand the implications of what they are buying. While we don’t believe in preaching to customers, we do hope through this process that we can encourage people to move towards buying more sustainable fish.

The Crouch End Project (CEP)

We are founder members of the CEP, which is an organisation of over 70 Independent retailers in Crouch End. We even have our own Crouch End card, which you can get instore. This provides you with a range of offers in CEP stores. click here for more details

Schools

We work extensively with local schools in Crouch End and Belsize Park. Not only have we used the Pennies for Plastic funds to contribute to specific projects, support numerous events and arrange school tours of the stores.

Our Team

While a huge amount of our focus is externally facing, we could not achieve any of this without the wonderful team of people we having working in both our stores. We have just undertaken an on line survey of all team members (and got a 94% response!) and have used it to shape how become a more inspiring place to work. On new bonus scheme means that 40% of the companies profits are allocated to the team. On new values are as follows:

Value no. 1 “Be Yourself”

Having the courage to be true to who you are and what you believe in, being honest and speaking up when you feel you have something important to add, valuing your own opinion, getting involved, doing what is right and at all times behaving in a way that you are proud of. Real people enjoying being relaxed and open with each other.

Value No. 2 “Be your Best”

Enjoying taking pride in always doing everything to the best of your ability; always doing what you can to make everyone else’s day better; enjoying being responsible and totally accountable. That means being reliable and doing what you say you are going to do and ideally always looking for ways to improve things. This is about feeling proud of who you are and how you do things.

Value no. 3 “Celebrate Food”

We are in business to bring the love and appreciation of food to life. This is about our joy and passion for good food inspiring our customers to discover new ways of loving everything about food including how it is produced, where it comes from and how their conscious purchasing can go to support a more sustainable future.

Value No. 4 “All Together”

Remembering in everything that we do, that everything is connected. All actions impact on all other actions. We are all in this world together and we have a responsibility to act in ways that only do good in the world. This is about being ethical and taking care of each other at work, at home and in the community. Treating the planet and all things that live on it with great respect, care and attention. This is about seeing all people as members of one family that must now come together to create a better world. With this understanding we can demonstrate that being good in business makes good business sense.

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