About Us

An important feature of organic farming is that the people raising animals and crops really do care about the environment. We are the same, so we do everything we can to make our packaging easy to recycle and our impact on the environment as negligible as possible.

We do this by having an ongoing policy of always reviewing the way we work to see if there is a new, better, more energy-efficient system we should be adopting.

This means that we are always studying new developments in production, looking for ways that we can become more efficient and trying to design packaging that uses the minimum amount of energy to produce and can be simply recycled.

You’ll see examples of this packaging approach in our yogurt pots. The large ones are made from the thinnest possible grade of polypropylene necessary to ensure that our yogurts reach you in perfect condition. On its own, this plastic layer wouldn’t be rigid enough, so it is given extra strength with a card label made from recycled board. The label is perforated so that you can easily separate the two if you live in one of the growing areas where your refuse collector asks you to put plastic in one bag and paper in another.

The clip-on lids on our big pots are made of a material called Eco-PET, a recycled and recyclable plastic which can be put into your plastics recycling box along with the Yeo Valley Organic milk bottles.

Our shelf ready packaging (the plastic trays our yogurts sit in on shelf) are made from recycled APET and they are 100% recylable.

If you have any recycling queries a really useful site to visit is www.recycle-more.co.uk this site has useful charts showing all the recycling identification symbols, advice on recycling and even a section where you can type in your postcode and find out where your nearest recycling centre is.

Yeo Valley Organic’s yogurt dairies have Environmental Management Systems (EMS), for which we have been awarded the international ISO14001 standard. These systems enforce formal environmental controls and measures throughout the yogurt-making process. The dairies have also undertaken Carbon Trust audits and carried out action plans to reduce their energy usage; these have included investment in energy-saving plant and equipment. Similarly, audits of water use have led to employee campaigns to reduce the amount of water used.

We have invested in a special fleet of double-decker trailers for the lorries that collect the yogurt from our dairies, so we have reduced the number of lorry journeys by almost 50%, and new recycled PET trays that you will see on the supermarket shelf have also reduced the number of pallets that we need, so reducing lorry usage even further.

Finally, all of the Yeo Valley Organic production, warehouse and office facilities use only Green Electricity, derived from 100% renewable sources. This is carbon-neutral and, in combination with many other activities across the business, has reduced the carbon emissions across the Yeo Valley business by over 50% in the past 12 months.

We continue to investigate ways to reduce our environmental impact yet further.