Alex Smith, founder of Alara Wholefoods, talks to Louise Bateman about getting people to buy organic again.
Q. The organic industry has just announced a £2 million campaign to get people buying organic again after recording a slump in sales. What are the objectives of the campaign in terms of getting sales back up?A. The aim is to grow total sales in this country at 15 per cent per annum for the next three years. The campaign will really kick off in January 2011, so for 2010 we are only really anticipating a slight improvement on 2009 and 15 per cent in 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Q. Alara is one of the largest organic muesli manufacturers in the UK. How has the business been affected by the slump in organic sales in 2009?A. About 60 per cent of all the organic muesli we make is our own brand, but we make a lot of muesli for other brands as well. Sales of Alara muesli grew 20 per cent last year, but other brands saw a dip.
Q. What do you put that growth down to?A. I put our growth down to the fact that the Alara brand is very good value for money. We are good at giving the consumer value for money.
Q. What message do you think the organic industry needs to get across to get people buying organic again? A.The whole issue of price perception is important and the problem is there’s very little understanding of the benefits of organic
food in this country. People say, "I am not going to buy organic eggs, instead I’m going to buy free range eggs." But organic eggs are not just free range, but offer better animal welfare than free range.
One of the interesting things about this campaign is that countries like Italy and Spain have done about 10 of these promotional campaigns and this is why they’ve seen their organic market grow. Across most of Europe and the US the organic market saw eight to 10 per cent growth. It is only in this country that we’ve seen such a slump. This is symptomatic of the support governments have given to organics in these countries. In Europe every single one of these campaigns has been supported by national government, but not in the UK. In fact, this is the first such campaign to be co-funded by industry.
Q. Despite the difficult trading conditions, Alara is proving that you can be successful and sustainable at the same time. Can you explain this?A. We’ve just launched our new branded range – the 'Everyday’ range. We’ve got five new products going into shops now. There are four organic products and one fair trade. They will go into natural food stores and will also be in Waitrose and we have samples going to Morrison’s today and anticipate they will be Holland & Barratt too. The whole point about these is they incorporate values that people that hold as important, but they are priced competitively. These are half-kilo boxes and theoretically, they should be able to sell at under £2. Most mid-range muesli on supermarket shelves sell at £4 a kilo, so you can see our own range is very competitive for an extremely high quality product.
As a business, we are also working from the top down and ground up. Top down because we are part of the global food agricultural business (we are exporting all over the world and importing all over the world), so we have challenges to understand how we can move our business at that level down the sustainability agenda.
From ground up, we are very involved in local food
production. Our factory is in Kings Cross in London and yet we have an orchard here, a vineyard here and a permaculture forest and community gardens. We are producing food around the factory. Permaculture is the best way of producing sustainable food and reconnecting with food in an urban environment.
We’ve also got our own wind turbine and we are producing our own electricity.
Q. I understand you are involved in Europe's largest community scale anaerobic digester? Can you tell me more about the project?A. We’ve got planning permission for the project, which is for the community around King Cross within about a two-mile radius. We are working with partner businesses in the area and we are now looking at various funding models.
The scheme will take four tonnes of food waste a day, while we as company produce about 200 kilos a week.
Anaerobic digestion (AD) is good because a huge amount of food is going to landfill and you just chuck stuff in it without thinking about it. When you have AD you are seeing food and so wasting less. At our company, when we began segregating food waste, the amount of food we threw away reduced by 60 per cent. Currently 50 per cent of food gets wasted down the supply chain, so if that was reduced by 60 per cent, you would have huge amount of food to feed a growing population.
Q. I understand your company is also zero waste? A. Yes, we were the first food manufacturer to go zero
waste about two and half years ago.
The key thing to becoming zero waste is to have all the team involved. We’ve got about eight or nine waste streams going out of the business, so we have to make sure that everything that is going out of the business is put in the right stream. So everybody has to have the knowledge that whatever they have in their hand needs to go in its own waste stream – so all cardboard goes in the cardboard waste stream, food in food waste, toners with toners, polystyrene in polystyrene, tin cans in tin cans. It took us about five years to do it.
Q. What would you say to other companies looking to become more sustainable in economically challenging times?
A. Waste is the most important thing to tackle. When you start looking at waste, there is a huge amount, not just food, by energy waste and people waste. There is a huge amount of waste happening in businesses and reducing waste is firstly making you more sustainable and secondly making you money. As I say, it should be regarded as the highest priority.
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