Re-using & Upcycling to Reduce Waste
At Raglan Food Co we’ve always had a focus on sustainability, and ensuring our products and packaging are as eco-friendly as possible. But more recently, we’ve been working on ways to reuse and upcycle the materials that are part of creating our products.
Here’s some cool things we’ve been working on!
Reforged Braziers
Raglan Food Co’s organic coconut cream comes in by the container load, in massive 220L steel drums. As you can imagine, these empty drums pile up when you’re making up to 30,000 jars a week! We’ve always re-used them where we can, and we even donated a bunch to help aid Tonga with shipping their food deliveries after their 2022 disaster. But our lead engineer, Dave was racking his brain with ideas of what else we could do with them, so Reforged was born! Up-cycling drums into beautiful Aotearoa-inspired braziers, finished in a heat-resistant paint and delivered straight to your door.
Recycled Tissue Paper
Instead of disposing of our empty jar/lid label backing into landfill, we’ve partnered with Avery Dennison to have them recycled into tissue paper. We estimate this initiative will help us divert more than 1,700kgs from landfill each year.
Foodie Friends Sample Boxes
You may have heard about our Foodie Friends Sample Boxes, getting samples from delicious Kiwi food companies delivered nationwide – instead of wrapping every item in bubble wrap or similar, we turned our cardboard (which we receive layered between our jars) into packaging material. Another clever local engineer, Peter, built a cardboard shredding machine which he kindly allows us to use. This means we have a 100% recycled way of padding and protecting each brand’s goodies, ensuring they all reach customers safely!
Waste-Water Diversion
We make our products in big tanks, and cleaning these at the end of each day uses many litres of water. Rather than getting this waste-water collected by a tank and carted off for treatment, we’ve successfully set up our own full water filtration and pumping system, to send it up to the neighbouring avocado farm, turning our waste into nutrients and reducing emissions at the same time.
A true win-win!
Compost & Worm Farm
We’ve also set up a compost and worm farm for staff’s food scraps, to fertilise the 900+ native trees we’ve planted all around our factory.
Why the Glass Jars?
We didn’t want to contribute to the plastic problem, so RFC became the first yoghurt brand to package in glass. 75% of glass used in NZ is recycled here. Glass can be endlessly recycled without reducing in purity or quality. Glass is made from natural materials (sand, soda ash, and limestone), not petrochemicals. There are many reasons we love using glass – if you have found some creative ways to reuse our jars, we’d love to seem them! Tag us on Facebook & Instagram
Our Snackable range and 400g Export ranges are currently housed in paperboard packaging, but we are doing everything we can to roll-out a fully recyclable option as soon as possible. Learn more about our packaging here.