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We minimise our environmental impact
by Ardo
As part of our goal to minimise Ardo’s negative environmental impact, we strive for operational excellence throughout the value chain. All of our farmers are verified at silver or gold level against SAI Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment (FSA). Furthermore, since 2013, we have gone a step further in crop management with the successful roll out of our MIMOSA programme. Now, we are even looking further than the crops themselves, with our MIMOSA+ programme.
In the field management phase, we use our MIMOSA+ programme to create optimal growing conditions that maximise yield and quality while minimising our environmental impact. We look beyond the crop itself by promoting optimal water management, a lower crop carbon footprint, regenerative agriculture practices, and biodiversity. During the production phase that follows, we limit energy consumption, CO2 equivalent emissions, water use, and packaging materials.
Healthy food simply tastes better
We consider our environmental impact not only for the sake of the planet, but also for the sake of our customers. We believe that end consumers feel better knowing that the vegetables, fruit and herbs they eat, are grown, cleaned, frozen, and distributed with minimal environmental impact. Communication about our environmental efforts can address a largely unconscious consumer desire to do good by caring for the planet.
Communication with end consumers about Ardo’s environmental responsibility can also serve as a market pull for a global food transition to plant-based products.
In this chapter, we describe how we minimise our environmental impact at the value chain’s operational level.
We focus on the most critical stages of the lifecycle of our vegetables, fruit and herbs:
• In the field management phase, we implement our MIMOSA+ programme for crop optimisation and climate change mitigation.
• In the production phase, we examine our carbon footprint, as well as how we manage our energy and water consumption, organic waste streams, and packaging activities.
• All external transportation impacts are out of the scope of this report and will be determined later. Based on this footprint, we will define our long-term goals for external transportation.
