Semantic Coherence: Organico (Realfoods) – Signal Evidence & AI Readability

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Lift the bonnet and what you will find is a company that has pioneered ethical issues for more than 20 years, working collaboratively and closely with NGO’s and food experts to fight for nature-friendly farming and ethical food systems.
It’s got more and more complicated as everyone now needs to shout about how sustainable they are and a PR machine of epic proportions, driven by the vested interests of huge corporations, is busy creating false narratives, sowing deliberate confusion, loudly and confidently taking up all the space – we call it “green-splaining” – and using an army of rent-a-report scientists to make sure that business more or less goes on as normal.  We all know this is happening.
At Realfoods we are constantly engaged in the battle, we recognise complexities, we freely admit the limits of our own knowledge and welcome the legitimacy of different viewpoints and debate but we do not accept big business putting the world to rights with arrogance and barely concealed self-interest.  Food systems are now in an incredible crisis globally, whether it be around biodiversity, the climate crisis, the poisoning of soils, water systems and the air, whether it’s about climate change, deforestation and the excesses and cruelty of industrialised livestock farming, whether it’s around affordability, poverty and access to decent food at one end or about unfair pricing and reward for farmers, producers and workers at the other, whether it’s around the monopoly and power being exercised at crucial pinch points in the supply chain or the relentless rise of junk foods, hyper-processing and all the consequential ills.
All of that, and more, it’s everything that real foods isn’t!

So, we work when and how we can with NGO’s and experts, devoting our time freely and joyfully to the cause, we are a founder of Food Talks with Sustain and the Food Ethics Council, we work with the organic movement in the UK and abroad to promote the good stuff.  Special shoutout to Slow Foods.  We love the concept of food and eating as a social and cultural construct, as been more than just away to fuel your body.  We love and live by the Slow Food motto of “good, clean and fair.”  Special shout out to the Soil Association, to the organic community more widely, the research institutes, Rodale, FIBL, ElmFarm in the UK and IFOAM internationally for promoting ecological farming.  Respect to the permaculture movement andthe original proponents of regenerative farming but NOT to the fakes, the cheapshot politicians and Agri-tech behemoths who want to colonise this term and dilute it until there is hardly anything left of value.
We could go on and on, so we’ll stop there: we are a small part of a huge agroecological common sense approach to food systems.We pledge to be open and transparent about who we work with, to tell the story of each our products so with GS1, who basically control barcode allocations in the UK, we’ve pioneered the future of, trumpets, da nana num, barcoding in the UK. That’s right the barcode will apparently one day become a QR code so we decided to make that today, right now. Each of our products has it’s own unique QR code which will take you directly to it’s own story, and also provide useful extra information including an all-important buy button.  Don’t worry we won’t quiz you on the provenance of all our products but we do give you a quite unique triple guarantee of our sustainability.  Each and every one of our products is certified organic and has undergone a rigorous audit by Planet Score, and at the company level we are proud to be a B Corp and join this growing movement of purpose driven businesses.
Organic food is better for nature and the environment and completely clean in terms of the processes and ingredients in production.  It is a guaranteed and controlled system that is inspected rigorously and annually.  Of course there are different degrees of organic but the big advantage organic hasover regenerative agriculture is that it is defined and controlled. Better for nature and the environment: Food and farming are incredibly complex subjects.  We agree with experts who they say you need to think of food and farming at system level.  It’s not good enough to just look at yields for example, you need to look at impacts but also what is been grown, who for,who by, is it nutritious?  Optimal is pointless in a system where we produce far too much meat (a whacking 80% of agricultural land is used up by livestock) and far too much junk food and where30% of food grown is thrown away.  This is a stupid system that isn’t working.
At Realfoods we believe in agroecology, nature-friendly and regenerative farming.  These five facts about organic agriculture prove the point: • Organic soils set the regenerative standard by storing 25% more carbon• Organic farms show a reduction of 40% in nitrous oxide emissions and 28% less nitrogen leaching• Energy demands on organic farms are at least 22% lower• On organic farms soil erosion and soil loss are 22% and 26% lower respectively• Organic farms are 50% more abundant in wildlife with up to 34% more speciesCompletely clean in terms of theprocesses and ingredients: Realfoods means no hidden nasties, just real ingredients. • 57% of food calories consumed in the UK are hyper-processed. That’s a shocking statistic!
There are 411 different additives allowed under EU regulations.  These fall into 8 headers: antioxidants, colorants, stabilizers, emulsifiers, thickeners, sweeteners, preservatives and gelling agents. It’s is a little known fact that products manufactured to organic standards don’t allow the vast majority of these additives – basically only natural and organic processing is allowed under the regulation. Organic agriculture
Planet Score is an environmental footprint tool.  You may be aware of climate labels with a climate score or a climate neutral claim.  In general governments have been looking atgoing beyond carbon labels and supporting the idea of product environmentalfootprint – or PEF.  There are 16 impactcategories in a PEF and these are habitually calculated using LCA’s life cycle analysis which calculates a product’s footprint against these metrics from cradle to gate or cradle to grave.  This is the maths/science.  LCA’s work verywell for industrial processes but do not work well for agricultural products, basically food and textiles, or fisheries. This has now been established even by the EU legislative process so anyone still proposing PEF’s based on a simplistic LCA calculation is basicallyout of touch.
In brief there are scientific minutia arguments on how LCA’s are arrived at in the detail, there is a big dispute around how you should account for methane (using GWP or GWP*), there is a concern around knock on effects not been covered, such as soil degradation orcarbon sequestration, but most important of all, biodiversity, one of the mostimportant impact categories is not properly assessed.  Even worse however is the ridiculous assumptions which many models of PEF analysis use that basically stipulate asubstitution effect so if for example you were to reduce the production of sayvery intensively produced pigs in Denmark for ecological reasons, the model would automatically count back in an even higher replacement value. This is a false assumption designed to support business as usual: it does not take into account the possibility of diet change, of less waste, of portion control, or even the possible economic/market impact of changes in price.Planet Score has addressed all these concerns and produced a well balanced, scientifically based environmental footprint tool.
It’s an auditing system that in effect is owned by the third sector, so is not for-profit, and theultimate decision making is not vested in a steering committee of major food multi-nationals but in a group of 25 scientists and NGO’s, representing different disciplines.  Planet Score is also intended as a tool to help companies improve their sourcing and has the undeniable advantage of scoring key individual metrics separately, including animal rights, pesticides, biodiversity and climate.
B Corp certification is basically a third party audit of a company’s ethical performance across a whole range of criteria under 5 major headings: governance, workers, community, environment and customers.   It’s slightly clunky and a little bit too in love with standard ESG process and terminology but it’s also a fantastic idea because it says that business needs to change.
There are 1000’s of B Corps in the world basically agreeing that is enough is enough, that business has to be about more than justthe financial rewards of a few shareholders. It’s a movement and an intention that we are very proud to be part of.  B Corp is an incredibly transparent system: our score and every little detail is easily accessible on the B Corp website.  Same of course for every other B Corp.  It is also a benchmarking tool that helped usto cover issues we weren’t focussed on and to help keep our eyes on the widerethical picture when commercial pressures make this difficult.As an organic company and pioneer in fish sustainability we have for a long time engaged in sustainability forums with NGO’s and experts, with the campaigning side of what we do then reflected inthe products we sell.
It makes Realfoods quite unique – a brand that talks the talk and walks the walk. This thankfully has been reflected in our B Corp score with a starting mark of 120, putting us into the top 3% worldwide and amazingly we are also recognised as one of the top 1% of all B Corps in the world for the environment.
For detailed information on our approach and commitments on our carbon footprint and the climate crisis please read our Better than Net Zero policy document from October 2021.  In brief we have:
• Evaluated where we stand and established that our current footprint and worked out thatwe are a relatively low footprint company in terms of food.
• Used the BRC Roadmap to net zero to benchmark ourselves against the food and retailproducts industry, demonstrating that we are well ahead of target dates on the road map.
• Reduced as far as possible our direct organisation footprint which falls mostly into Scope 1 and 2. This has been calculated annually for our financial year end by an independent third party organisation using established metrics.
• Realised that the vast majority of our footprint is indirect, it’s the products we sell, accounting for over 90% our footprint.
• Calculated, again through a third party organisation, a CO2 footprint value for the majority of our products and transposed that into our everyday inventory software.
We don’t like the term carbon neutral or even worse the carbon negative.  We don’t really think “net zero” is terminology that corporations should use – but understand the idea of seeking to recue as fast as possible and committing to lower climate impacts and developing medium or long term targets.  Both carbon neutral and net zero rely ultimately on offsets and we didn’t like the idea of buying random offsets off of flashy carbon dealers with flashy websites. Also we were informed by reports from Oxfam, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace that the world of offsetting was one steeped in greenwashing.
In order to comply with corporate practise we have paid for certified or verified offsets for our organisation footprint, which is small, but decided to do things differently for our indirect carbon footprint.  We like to think more in terms of carbon compensation. Based on fairly conservative estimates of the carbon value of trees, we feel we could over-claim in terms of carbon neutrality but we would prefer to stay with the idea that we are contributing or compensating for our footprint.  This has been in the form of a pledge to plant an Organico forest of ½ million trees through Eden Reforestation Projects.
In addition we’ve donated to Ecosystem Restoration Camps and the Environmental Justice Foundation. These donations have been made before and regardless of profit, i.e. they are in effect considered as a cost or tax for us.We were planning to recalculate our product footprint but feel that the whole area of CO2 calculation is very tricky at present – and that there isn’t a completely reliable or practical solution available.
We’ve also concluded that Planet Score basically does the job better because it has spent 4 long years in this space, understanding LCA analysis for a whole product footprint, not just carbon, and tailoring a solution with an intelligent weighting of the various factors and the right type of adjustments made to supportnature-friendly farming.
You can find all of our ethical policies and company information over on our parent site organicorealfoods.com or by following the link below.Ethical Policies