Impact Report
Hello!
Berry nice to meet you! My name is Rachel and I am Fearne & Rosie’s mum.
I'm a former teacher, who started building Fearne & Rosie from my kitchen table, using my phone, a notebook and my very ‘well used’ pencil case after I’d put the children to bed.
To me it was simple, there should not be the amount of sugar and junk that there is in the jams that we are giving to our children.
There should be a healthier alternative.
And now there is!
Our more fruit, less sugar jams are now available in Waitrose, Morrisons, Ocado, Booths, Milk & More and independents across the country.
We have big dreams for our little brand and over for the next few years we will continue to grow, creating healthier, tastier, happier jams for families whilst also committing to increasing our positive impact in our community.
In our annual Impact Report, we chart our journey to date, identifying key impact areas, reflecting on the positive impact we have had and setting ambitious goals for 2023 and beyond.
Thank you as always for all of your support.
Rachel
BCORP
March 2023
We believe that our business
should be a force for good in the world.
In November 2022 we were jamtastically excited to be officially recognized as a certified B Corporation.
Globally, we are one of the first of (hopefully many…) healthier jam businesses to do, achieving a 93.4 B Impact Score. For context, the median score for an ordinary business would be 50.9 and a business must score over 80 points to certify as a B Corp.
We chose B Corp, because we feel that the structure and accreditation gives us the best framework to achieve our long term ambitions.
We are committed to balancing profit and purpose, and were commended for our Impact Business Model via our work with communities and charitable initiatives including FareShare and BBC Children in Need.
We endeavour to work within the B Corp community with many other lovely brands that share our commitment to social responsibility and enviornmental impact.
Together we can all help to spread a little goodness!
We’re trying to change the world one jar at a time.
We know it’s ambitious, and that there's plenty of work to do, but we’re doing our berry best to make a positive impact... one jar at a time!
We’re committed to continually trying to improve and to always do our berry best.
Governance
A fundamental part of becoming a B Corp is to formally commit to always considering stakeholder interests including employees, suppliers, shareholders, society and the environment.
This is called our mission lock and in simple terms it means that we value people and planet above profit.
This has and always will be our goal and we are delighted to make an official commitment to incorporate this into our Company Articles of Association.
We track and share our social and environmental impact at Board level and with wider stakeholders quarterly.
Workers
To make the berry best jam we need the berry best people.
We are committed to providing a fun, safe and nurturing environment for our staff.
We have created policies to ensure we are a fair, inclusive, diverse and flexible place to work and will be doing more to ensure we continually grow and improve to meet the needs of our staff.
Customers
Our mission is to provide healthier, tastier food choices for families.
We want as many families as possible to be able to access healthier food choices and we do our berry best to keep our prices competitive.
It is important to us that Fearne & Rosie is premium as well as affordable for families.
We also take our customer data security, production and supply chain safety very seriously.
We are a family-run business and the community we have created through social media and beyond feels like an extension of that family - we want to keep it that way.
We are committed to improving our customer feedback and service.
Should you have any thoughts or wish to share feedback with Fearne & Rosie please email: hello@fearneandrosie.co.uk and we'll do our (berry) best to help.
Community
We want to bring joy and share jammy goodness with our local and wider community.
We want to do our bit to help the wider community. We make specific charity product lines and make in kind donations to some incredible charities (which you can find out more about below).
As a teacher, our founder Rachel, knows the importance of engaging children in healthier eating. Creating accessible educational resources is one of our long term goals and we have created free school resource packs to begin our journey with this.
At Fearne & Rosie we want to educate and inspire families to make healthier food choices. In 2022 we conduted nutritional profiling work with Dr Ryan Williams (PhD) to ensure we are best placed to deliver tasty productswith jamtastic nutritional credentials.
Research conducted by the NHS indicates that obesety levels in children are rising.
10.1% of reception age children (age 4-5) were obese in 2021/22, with a further 12.1% were overweight.
At age 10-11 (year 6), 23.4% were obese and 14.3% overweight.*
A simple swap to Fearne & Rosie Reduced Sugar Jams will save a family of 4 over 800 sugar cubes a year.
With childhood obesity on the rise, we want to help cut sugar intake in UK households with our reduced sugar jams.
Our goal is to cut 61 million sugar cubes out of family households by 2025, whilst educating on wider health along the way.
* https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/national-child-measurement-programme (accessed, 14.3.23)
Environment
We are acutely aware that everything we do has an environmental impact and we believe it is our job to minimise any negative impact and look for opportunities to make a positive difference.
That’s why we use recycled and recyclable packaging, use as many local ingredients as we can, and opt for shipped produce over air-freight.
We actively encourage the use of wonky fruits historically welcoming surplus produce into our supply chain.
We want to do so much more and are just beginning our journey to record and monitor our carbon footprint.
Plastic Free Delivery
The boxes we send out our jams in need be strong to protect our glass jars on their journey from our packing table to your kitchen.
The cheapest and easiest way to protect the jars would be to use plastic bubble wrap but for us this was not an option.
We have experimented with potato starch packaging but working with our box manufacturer have created double layered 70 % recycled content boxes and inserts to keep your jams safe.
Our panelled jars are made from 50% recycled glass and are 100% recyclable.
We use paper parcel tape and never send out parcels in plastic postage bags, despite it being significantly more expensive to not do so!
At Fearne & Rosie we will continue to follow packaging innovations increasing packaging sustainability as we grow.
Our Suppliers
In the coming years we will be exploring using more recycled materials and continuing to uphold human rights and animal welfare.
To do this we will need to work even closer with our suppliers. We have established our Ethical Requirements for Suppliers, a code of conduct that we have invited all our suppliers to sign up to.
Impact
We believe our products are premium products; containing only the berry best ingredients.
We also believe that quality food should be accessible for all.
This year we have worked really hard to ensure our products are affordable to as many people as possible and have maintained the price of our family jars whilst also increasing the jar size.
We run regular promotions across all channels doing our berry best to ensure Fearne & Rosie jams are accessible to as many families as possible.
In addition to reducing the price of our jams, we have been working hard
to expand the number of outlets our jams are available in. You can now find Fearne & Rosie in 153 Waitrose Stores and 10 Morrisons stores, as well as being available through Ocado, Booths, Milk & More and hundreds of independents.
Designed to give
Here at Fearne & Rosie we believe that business should be a force for good.
We're commited to balancing profit and purpose now and as we grow.
Fearne & Rosie commits to always donating at least 2% of revenue to charitable causes.
We have done this for the past two fiscal years and plan to continue to do this until 2025 and beyond.
YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT OUR CHARITABLE PARTNERSHIPS HERE:
https://fearneandrosie.co.uk/collections/children-in-need
https://fearneandrosie.co.uk/pages/fareshare
Supporting our Community
We want to be one of the best places to work in the UK and to support our community in any way we can.
We take pride in making our tasty jams and in the positive feedback we get from customers.
But sadly not everyone has access to healthier food choices. Research suggests that overall measures of relative poverty in the UK is at 22% and that relative child poverty has continued to creep up, being 4% higher in 2020 than in 2012 (a raise of 700,000 children).2
In an effort to help families who struggle to make ends meet, we work with FareShare Yorkshire, to donate our jams to local family charities.
We also volunteered for a day with FareShare to learn more about the work that they do to support vulnerable families across the U.K.
2 Crib.J, Waters. T, Wernham. T, Xu. Xiaowei, (2021) Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2021, Institute of Fiscal Studies. Available at https://ifs.org.uk/publications/15512 , [Accessed 07 March 2022]
Fareshare
We encourage and enable our customers (who feel they are in a position to be able to), to buy an extra jar for FareShare when ordering through our website.
We also created a special edition Christmas jam. For every jar bought by a customer Fearne & Rosie donated a jar to FareShare.
Together we have donated over 3,000 jars to FareShare since 2020.
We also volunteered for a day, working with the FareShare team to help pack and sort deliveries, learning more about the impact of the work that they do.
BBC Children in Need
🍓BERRY EXCITING NEWS🍓
In October 2022 we shared our BERRY exciting Children in Need partnership.
We all know Paddington is partial to a marmalade sandwich... But, did you know our family favourite bear Pudsey loves a jam sandwich or two!
At a time when more and more families need help, we’re partnering with @bbccin to help provide additional support for vulnerable children across the UK.
As a small (but fast growing!) healthier jam brand, we are extremely humbled to be a part of the @bbccin appeal especially as making a positive impact is at the heart of all that we do at Fearne & Rosie. 🍓
We’re on a mission to bring back the jam to UK households and by donating £1 from every jar of our best selling Fearne & Rosie Strawberry Jam sold via our website there is no easier way to help create change.
We feature regulregularly on BBC Breakfast to spread jammy goodness and raise awareness of Fearne & Rosie and BBC Children in Need.
We're berry busy setting our goals for 2023 and will update you as soon as we can...
Future preser-bilities
We're working hard on our mission to #bringbackthejam launching in more stores across the U.K. and beyond!
As we grow we're excited to launch new products (In new super market aisles!) doing our berry best to ensure healthier and tastier products are readily available to even more families.
Thank you
We're right at the beginning of our jamtastic little journey and we look forward to continuing to share our progress with you as we grow.
Should you have any further questions about our Impact Report, Fearne & Rosie generally or ideas to add to our 'jars for improvement' you can email hello@fearneandrosie.co.uk and please do follow the farm on socials @fearne_and_rosie.
Thank you as always for your support.