apetito has won three awards at the Food and Drink Federation’s (FDF) National Awards.
apetito won Best Sustainable Packaging Award for its ‘boomerang’ initiative, believed to be the world’s first industrial-scale recycling scheme for ready meal trays. The initiative has seen thousands of plastic trays collected from apetito sister company Wiltshire Farm Foods’ customers and recycled into new trays at the company’s specialist partner facility in Durham.
apetito also won the Environmental Leadership Award for Leading the Way to Net Zero and for its progressive stance on reducing carbon emissions in every part of its business.
Lee Sheppard, director of corporate affairs and policy said: “Sustainability is central to everything that we do within our business. It’s important to our customers and is a real passion for everyone who works within our business. We hope our ground-breaking recycling initiative encourages other businesses to follow suit and consider how be given a new life through circular recycling schemes.
“We believe in ‘action now’ and have made a clear and meaningful commitment to reducing our carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2040 via challenging interim targets for 2025 and 2035. By 2025, we aim to decarbonise in line with Paris Climate Agreement requirements to meet a Net Zero 1.5c pathway and by 2035, we aim to deliver further substantial decarbonisation.
“We go far beyond making a simple marketing-led Net Zero pledge and it’s why we have had our targets independently verified by the SBTi [Science Based Targets initiative]. Our targets are based on solid science rather than marketing greenwash.”
For its third win of the night, Declan Henderson, apetito’s category development manager in specialist nutrition, took home the FDF’s Rising Star Award. Declan headed up development of apetito’s specialist nutrition range Finger Food Bites, which was designed to support the future of dementia-friendly dining in care homes. He said: “I’m truly honoured to have been recognised with the FDF’s Rising Star Award 2022 and would pay tribute to the whole specialist nutrition team here at apetito – everyone works tirelessly to conceive and bring to market new products which consistently break new ground in the world of specialist nutrition.
“Everything we do is designed to make a real difference and we know our specialist nutrition meals can be a life-changer for residents living with dementia or other illnesses.”
