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Rebel Kitchen is officially carbon neutral

Rebel Kitchen is a Food and Beverage company with a difference. They strive to improve the wellbeing of people and planet. They create healthy, plant-based dairy alternatives that taste” mind-blowingly good” (in their words, for which we have to agree!), and in doing so connect people and planet in a sustainable and meaningful way. We are very excited that one piece of this puzzle for Rebel Kitchen is to be carbon neutral partly through supporting our Cordillera Azul National Park project in Peru.

For many of our fellow B Corps business as usual is not an option. Rebel Kitchen is certainly no exception to this. They are here to show that business can, and should, be a force for good.

As part of their Purpose Manifesto (a great read that we highly recommend), Rebel Kitchen made the commitment to be carbon neutral by 2025. Like all companies going through this journey they first needed to measure their impact on the climate. They used another B Corp, Carbon Analytics and Provenance who helped them measure their entire carbon footprint, from the obvious like purchasing ingredients, transporting goods, manufacturing etc, to the coffee cups they used at trade shows. Read about their journey here.

In line with best practice, and what we at Ecosphere+ encourage all companies who want to go carbon neutral to do first, Rebel Kitchen is looking to reduce their footprint as much as possible, this is vital, especially as companies grow. We feel Rebel Kitchen explain a reduction in their carbon intensity pretty well, so we will leave it to them:

What is carbon intensity? Good question. In a nutshell, it’s a way of comparing carbon use as a percentage of revenue business-to-business and sector-by-sector. It can also be used by companies to determine if their carbon use is in line relative to their growth. In this case, less is definitely more. It’s not always straightforward. There are complexities for SMEs, as the numbers can be deceiving if you’re looking for linear reductions. For example, if you’re always innovating new products, like we are at Rebel Kitchen, it can impact your year-on-year improvement. Say we developed a product one year, but it didn’t go to market until the next, it’s likely to affect the carbon to revenue in a way that’s not a straight decline. Our 1-litre Mylk launch came a year after its development, which likely contributed to this significant reduction.  We don’t know what the next year holds, and while it’s unlikely we will top this incredible success, we can now track and analyse our carbon use on a monthly basis which we recognise as an invaluable step in the right direction for Rebel.

 

In fact, their average intensity has been 35% lower than the Food and Beverage sector as a whole over the past 4 years, so congratulations Rebel Kitchen!

After the thorough analysis by Carbon Analytics, Rebel Kitchen had their footprint for 2018-2019 and decided to go one step further to achieve their carbon neutral goal 5 years early by immediately offsetting their entire business-wide footprint;  you can see all the numbers here.  By doing this they have put a value on the negative externalities of their products, in their words – “the entire economic ripple required to get you our products has been offset… and that every pound you spend on Rebel Kitchen is netting nothing to the environment.”

To achieve this, Rebel Kitchen chose to support two natural climate solutions projects in Peru, one of which is our beautiful Cordillera Azul National Park project which works to conserve threatened Amazon rainforest. Rebel Kitchen sources several ingredients, including cacao from around the globe, one of the key sustainable livelihoods programmes at our project is developing agroforestry systems for cacao with local and indigenous communities as way to reduce pressures on the forest.  By purchasing carbon credits from this project, Rebel Kitchen is not only helping to protect high-value Amazon rainforest but also supporting activities such as female empowerment, environmental education, biodiversity protection and helping farmers create sustainable livelihoods in the same region in which they source key ingredients in their supply chain.

Rebel Kitchen is setting an example for others to follow and we are proud to help them in their journey. They know there is a lot of work to do and offsetting isn’t everything, but are on a quest to do even better.

 

If you want to find out more about how you or your company can become carbon neutral and in the process support one of our forest conservation or restoration projects, get in touch here.