As the UK was about to head into another Covid lockdown towards the end of 2020, I needed to find a safe way of buying fresh vegetables. I’ve never liked buying them from supermarkets – too many air miles, too many unknown origins and way too much plastic packaging.

My local farm shop could have delivered to me, along with their fresh meat and delicious sausages. But they don’t tell me where the produce is grown, and their prices are high.

A friend introduced me to Riverford (Riverford Organic Farmers, to give them their full name.) With their main farm in Devon, in the southwest of the UK, they work with farms all over the UK and mainland Europe. They only sell seasonal veg and while they do provide veg that we can’t grow in the UK all year round, they don’t use planes to bring produce into the country. So, if you want early tomatoes, they might come from Spain or Portugal and they come by sea.

Riverford also put a great deal of emphasis on how they treat their staff and the small, specialist growers with whom they work. Good wages. Good working conditions. Good rewards.

When I signed up with Riverford, a box of fresh, seasonal veg and salad would be delivered to my home on a Friday morning. There was still mud on the carrots and I found the occasional ‘visitor’ in the lettuces. Nothing that a quick wash can’t sort out. There were wonky parsnips and the sprouts weren’t all the same shape and size. They still tasted great!

Deliveries from Riverford come in recycled and recyclable cardboard boxes. Leave last week’s box out to be collected when your delivery arrives. In the early days of buying from them, some produce would arrive in a plastic bag. Within a few months, every single plastic bag had been replaced with home compostable ‘plastic’ bags. They all ended up on my compost heap and they all rotted down nicely.

Riverford is the best shopping example of Contribution that I can think of. Yes, they provide delicious, fresh, organic produce. That’s not why I bought from them. A growing fleet of electric delivery vans; compostable bags and returnable cardboard boxes; zero air miles; fair trade. These are the reasons that they were my number one.

Buying from Riverford allowed me to make less of an impact on our planet, helping me to take more responsibility for my buying decisions. Shopping with Riverford helped me to make a bigger, collective impact on reducing waste, the use of chemicals in farming and single-use plastic. They helped me to contribute to something much, much bigger. Helping humanity is what Riverford is about and that’s the third strategy of Contribution.

Is Contribution the strategy that will make your business stand out this year?