Organic Centre Wales

OCW is the national resource for consumers, farmers and policy makers committed to more sustainable food and farming in Wales

The Challenge

• OCW wanted to help organic businesses to understand their footprint of their supply chain
• They then wanted to support them in improvements so as to improve the performance and image of the sector
• As these are generally small businesses and geographically dispersed, it would be important to make direct contact and encourage them to take part

Our Approach

• We first developed a tailored supply chain Sustainability healthcheck process
• We then actively engaged with over 60 organic businesses across Wales and applied the benchmark to 25 of these to measure how they compared to best practice
• For representative businesses, we then carried out a deeper review and developed specific Sustainability Action Plans to guide each business on the priorities for improvement

Results

• The benchmarking showed that most organic businesses in Wales had made some progress but were still a long way from best practice
• Organic businesses now have specific Sustainability Action Plans to guide their future progress
• Learnings from the project have been produced for each sub-sector (meat, dairy, fresh produce, retail) and recommendations made for how the industry can work together to make further progress