Our mission is Making Life Peachy – for our guests, team, suppliers and planet.
From serving food-waste fighting Rubies in the Rubble ketchup, to removing plastic bottles from our bathrooms and ongoing recycling efforts, we make sure that not only are we trying our best to be sustainable, but help you to go green too.
To find out more about our Bigger Peach Story, click here.
2023 saw our Bigger Peach journey continue as we started a new foot-printing process with Energise, introducing smart-cellar cooling in all pubs, and enhanced reporting from Biffa to help improve recycling across the pubs. In addition to this, our landfill-avoiding, coffee ground scheme saw 15,000 bags of used coffee grounds donated to our guests.
Over Christmas we celebrated with crackers without any plastic and those who dined with us over Christmas helped us raise over £5k for CALM, a charity focused on suicide prevention. Bringing our fundraising total for 2023 to over £16k.
We continued to build relationships with suppliers who share the same ethics as we do, with supplier trips to Jude’s Ice Cream, the vineyards of Nyetimber and award-winning Cotswolds hand printers, Rapture & Wright.
Our menus are even more sustainable too, as we introduced a fourth vegetarian main, reduced the meat content by 10% in our burger serve and reduced the calorie content across our main menu. You can now check out all this information on our menu pages online.
We supported several charities, raising £1,200 for the Drinks Trust in partnership with Discarded rum, over £1,000 for Mind two Peachy team members, Joe & Sian, rode to Paris and back, raising £16,011 for a charity supporting Dementia through music.
We continued to review our impact on the planet; removing dredged native scallops off our menus, swapping planet-harming felt Christmas hats for fully recyclable UK made paper hats and offset the impact of all menu printing impact through the World Land Trust.
Learn more about what we’ve been up to with our annual impact report below.
We continued to support Helping Hands in Warwickshire, producing meals for those most in need, and donating food packages and hot meals to those in and around Eversley Cross.In March our Sticker and Sustainability Tour started in the pubs, educating team on the importance of helping to make our planet a little peachier.
During lockdown three we raised £38,000 and donated to over 19 charities. In June we celebrated being 24th in 100 of the Best Companies to work for and raised £4,236 for The Burnt Chef Project – a campaign dedicated to health support for the UK hospitality trade.
We warmed up our outside spaces with textiles and blankets using recycled plastics and raised over £4,900 for Fareshare at Christmas.
We started the year with our plan on how to become the Best Gastropub on the Planet. We agreed our sustainability policy, and 10 promises to help us achieve our purpose; from feeding guests well, to supporting charities and conserving natural resource to protect out planet. In Spring, we removed all single use plastic soap and lotion bottles from our pubs and bedrooms, and replaced with sustainable, refillable aluminium bottles.
As we entered lockdown, a team of Peach volunteers supported Your Hub, an initiative to help feed frontline workers and those most in need in the local communities, and in Autumn we donated £3,000 to Hospitality Action - a charity aimed at supporting colleagues in our industry.
In October we removed single use glass Heinz bottles from our pubs, and moved to Rubies in the Rubble, and as the year drew to an end, we continued feeding those most in need in our towns, producing over 2,000 meals across 20 charities.
In January, we returned to Kenya supporting the Peach Foundation. Working with the Enonkishu Conservancy in the Maasai Mara, Kenya, to help fund the conservancy project, aiming to create a sustainable conservancy for local land owners.
Being a Peachy place to work, learn and grow is promise number two and we were thrilled to see a re-entry into the Top Times 100 Companies to Work for. We also launched an initiative to pay overtime for all Sous Chefs and Deputies, and introduced a scheme to increase our travel per mile rate to team who car-pool.
Throughout the back end of the year, we delivered Charity donation boxes to all pubs, and donated to WWF to support their ongoing efforts to protect wildlife during the wildfires. We also joined The Sustainable Restaurant Association and embarked on an adventure of producing our very own bespoke-blended sustainable wine - After The Clouds.
We also banned the purchase of plastic pens, and raised over £6,000 for Shelter.
The Bigger Peach Team meet monthly to review our promises and discuss what more we can do. Reviewing our supply chains to minimise the impact of products containing palm oil, to our use of clingfilm, how we can become carbon-neutral and offering more plant based choices on our menus. Striving to be the most sustainable Gastro Pub Company on the Planet never stops.
While we think we do a lot, there is always more we can do. Each year we target ourselves with doing something great each month, so please do get in touch with any new ideas and let’s make a difference together. Email us at hello@peachpubs.com.