AN EMPLOYER OF CHOICE We have long-held our ambition to become an Employer of Choice and with a clearly defined Colleague Value Proposition – or what we refer to as our ‘give and get’ – Princes has become increasingly people-centric. At a time of uncertainty, we were quickly able to work differently; ensuring that our colleagues were clear about what was expected of them and (importantly) what they could expect from us. During the past 12 months we have seen a real acceleration across our People Excellence activity – from prioritising colleagues health and wellbeing by adopting new and pragmatic measures and agreeing increasingly flexible ways of SMART working to launching an on-demand learning and development platform to support continuous learning to driving our inclusion and diversity programme for example. With all that effort and colleague resilience in evidence, I am particularly proud that this is the year Princes was recognised as ‘Employer of the Year’ at The Grocer Gold Awards. It is a tremendous accolade made all the more significant by the positive (and honest) assessment of the expert panel. And actually, our people awards don’t stop there – Food Management Today named our Commercial Graduate Scheme ‘Best Training Initiative’. The progress we have made is all thanks to the tremendous efforts and resilience of our colleagues, they really do make Princes a great place to work.
ADVANCING OUR ENVIRONMENTAL CREDENTIALS In line with our vision to ‘Proudly help families to eat well, without costing the Earth’, Princes continued to build on a longstanding commitment to sustainability throughout our operations in 2021, launching a new ‘2030GreenGoals’ initiative. As part of this initiative, we have committed to achieving carbon neutrality across our UK and international operations by 2030, building on a 23% reduction in carbon emissions since 2014/2015. Over the next 10 years, we also aim to increase internal energy generation up to 50%, while reducing water general waste and food waste - with a focus on improving efficiencies and driving towards self-generation and renewable energy, such as biogas from waste, as well as reducing and reusing materials. We have made sustainability improvements to our products too – switching all Princes tuna multipacks to cardboard sleeve packaging has removed 96 tonnes of plastic, while our Napolina brand has moved its core pasta range into recyclable cardboard packaging, removing up to 200 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic.
Proactive engagement across the global seafood industry to help protect ocean ecosystems also continues to be a crucial element of our sustainability efforts. This is why we continue to take an active role in the debate over Indian Ocean (IO) tuna, having announced that we will take a 50% voluntary cut in IO sourced yellowfin tuna due to concerns at stock levels.
LOOKING AHEAD I am extremely proud of what we have accomplished as a business during a challenging, but transformative year. While continuing to navigate the longer-term impacts of Covid-19 and Brexit, we are well-positioned for a bright future, and look forward to delivering further growth and success in the months to come.
MANAGING DIRECTOR
Additional projects completed in 2021 will also see a reduction of 700 tonnes of plastic a year from soft drinks and edible oils bottles, and continued efforts to reduce food waste, as a member of the Champions 12.3 coalition, have led to a *13% decrease across our global operations in the year to March 2021.
*Based on ALL waste including that put to positive use.
