Our bit for the planet – we don’t just tick boxes…

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

As a sign of our continued commitment to reducing our carbon footprint, we have signed up for 10:10. If you haven’t already done so, click here to find out how you can sign up.

We are thrilled to have recently won Sustainable Retailer of the Year at the CIWM Awards in London, up against some much bigger players than us, including Asda.

Food from the Sky

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 will be undertaken by a team of volunteers from Crouch End.

For more information on Food from the Sky, please click here to access the web site.

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.

Pennies for Plastic

Since we launched our Pennies for Plastic scheme, we’ve managed to prevent over 5.5 million plastic bags going into landfill. At the same time, we have raised £55,000 for local charities and organisations on the way. Pennies for Plastics has now been launched formerly as a Trust Fund. For more details, please click here.

Waste to Landfill

We now only put 6% of our total waste into landfill, a claim that few other supermarkets could get near to! We give away what food we can and turn the rest of our food waste into electricity. Needless to say all paper and cardboard is recycled and our general waste is even sorted and recyclable elements extracted.

We offer battery, mobile phone, cartridge and clothes recycling facilities at our stores.

Energy

We have recently installed energy monitoring equipment to help us reduce the electricity we use. Our new lighting scheme in Crouch End is predicted to save us 46% usage. Once evaluated we plan to roll this out to Belsize Park.

Free Home Delivery Service

By encouraging you to leave your car at home when you come food shopping at Thornton’s Budgens, we’re saving you petrol and reducing our overall carbon footprint. For more details, please click here.

Waste Less, Save Money

We would like to find ways to help you waste less food and so save money….

In the UK we throw away a 1/3 of the food we buy, which is almost the same as throwing money straight in the bin, not to mention the harm we are doing to our planet in the process.

Don’t Let a Good Thing go to Waste

This was launched in September. Arthur Potts Dawson of Acorn House has produced for us, seasonal suggestions for dishes to make with food you might normally waste, or have left over. Watch this space!

Any suggestions for tried and tested or favourite recipes for using up leftover food, or ways to feed a cast of thousands without costing the earth, please e-mail them to us.

Sustainable Fishing Policy

We have launched our Sustainable Fishing policy in Belsize Park. It is our aim initially to eliminate all products that are rated 5 by the Marine Conservation society (ie those species in the most danger). We will also be 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. We will introduce this to Crouch End in due course.

Speaking of Sustainable issues, if you are interested in Sustainability and have a young baby, then you might want to check out Babi Pur.

The Crouch End Project (CEP)

We are founder members of the CEP, which is an organisation of over 50 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

Belsize Eco Week

We are co-organisers of this event with Transition Belsize. Year 2 was a fantastic success right across Belsize. Specifically at Thornton’s Budgens, we launched our bike based home delivery service, our sustainable fishing policy and a charge for carrier bags. For more details, please click here.

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, we also support numerous events, arrange school tours of the stores and have recently launched the Music For All scheme in Crouch End.

Growers Club

We are very keen to encourage local growers and very small producers. We are trying to set up a regular ‘growers stall’ outside both stores, so if you grow or make more food that you can use yourself, please e-mail us click here.

Local Events

Whether its Belsize Eco Week or the Hornsey 10K and Fun Run, we are heavily involved in sponsoring and organising a number of key events locally. We believe that we should put something back into the community we operate in and see key events such as this as a critical part of our existence.

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. In order to give everyone in the company a say in our future direction, we have recently started a team forum. Lead by a team member in each store, this group meets monthly to review issues and input into our future strategy.

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