Our approach to sustainability.
We’re a family business with a strong set of values, and we aspire to make a positive difference in the world.
That means improving our consumers' lives with fantastic tea and coffee - but it also means protecting the people and places we depend upon. This approach informs every decision we make. It guides the way we grow as a business, prioritising good, long term decisions over pure profit. And guides the unique way we work with our suppliers, putting quality, relationships and the environment front and centre. We want our planet to be sustainable for generations to come.
Responsible sourcing.
Our approach to sourcing is focused on building a resilient supply chain that strives to help the farmers and workers we rely on to achieve a decent standard of living through producing tea and coffee.
Building strong relationships with our suppliers has always been important to us - we trade in a way that puts quality, sustainability and relationships at its heart. It’s called the Taylors Sourcing Approach (TSA) and it's based on long-term contracts, fair prices and transparency. You can read more here, on our sourcing approach on the Taylors Impact website.
Community Development.
We’re lucky enough to partner with suppliers and farmers who are working hard to help the communities they’re based in to thrive. We invest in initiatives that are designed to drive positive change - and we work closely with our suppliers to make sure that they make a real difference in the long term.
We’ve been funding water initiatives in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda and have helped to supply thousands of homes with fresh, clean water.
We’ve supported communities to buy cows in Rwanda, we’ve helped supply livestock packages to families in Guatemala, and we fund porridge projects at schools in Kenya.
We've also been helping kids to access a decent education, and we want to make sure they have what they need to make the most of every day school life. And we’ve invested to help bring better healthcare services to the rural communities in our supply chain.
We've also made a commitment to close the living wage gap across our supply chain. Our aim is to have made significant progress by 2025, with a target of 2030 to ensure all workers are receiving a Living Wage.
Read more here, on the Taylors Impact website.
Climate change.
We're a Carbon Neutral Company – and in 2021, we were honoured to be awarded a United Nations Climate Action Now award. The awards singled out eleven of the world’s most innovative, scalable, and replicable examples of action to tackle climate change, highlighting our journey to becoming a Carbon Neutral business.
Our climate work started in 1990, when we began planting trees around the world, working with our partners and suppliers to help farmers adapt to the impacts of climate change. Our first project was in the Shone Valley, 200 miles south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Working with partners such as the National Trust, Tree Aid and Oxfam we reached our millionth tree in 2000, but we didn’t stop there. By 2007, we had planted a total of 3 million.
Next, we launched our Yorkshire Rainforest Project and in all we helped to protect 237,000 hectares of Amazonian Rainforest in Peru.
Then came a major new tree planting project – working in partnership with Natural Capital Partners, TIST (The International Small Group and Tree Planting Programme) and our friends at the Kenya Tea Development Agency, we set about to encourage smallholder tea farmers to plant fruit and nut trees on their farms. These trees help the environment by soaking up carbon, but they also provide valuable secondary income, along with shade and food. To date, almost 3 million trees have been planted and over 45,000 farmers have signed up.
And we try to do our bit at home, too. We installed solar panels on our tea factory generating almost 200,000 kwh of electricity a year, and several years ago we relocated all our south coast tea and coffee imports to the north east coast, saving 136,000 road miles and 205.8 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the first year alone. We use an electric van for local internal deliveries, have a staff lift sharing scheme in place and electric car charging points for staff and visitors.
Our factory and offices have sent zero waste to landfill since 2017, and we’re finding ways to reduce the waste we generate with an ambition to stop all avoidable waste by 2025.
We’ve found ways to reduce carbon emissions for our international trade too. Our site in the United Arab Emirates helps us to blend and pack tea products for Australasia and the Middle East, hugely reducing the shipping distance the tea would have taken if we imported and exported it from the UK.
You can read more about help protect our planet on the Taylors Impact website.
Packaging and waste.
We’re working hard to make our products as sustainable as possible on the inside and out. We’re committed to removing single use, unnecessary plastics from our products.
By 2025, our target is for all our plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable - and all our plastic packaging to contain a minimum of 30% recycled content.
Our ideal is for our packaging to never become waste or pollution. Our ambition is for all of the packaging we produce to be circular in design – both inputs and outputs. This means that we want the resources involved in our packaging to be used again and again in a closed-loop or ‘circular system’.
This includes materials made from recycled content or renewable resources. It means that we will need to eradicate the use of virgin oil-based plastic and any other virgin materials. After it’s been used, we want all our packaging to be reused, recycled or composted.
You can read more about how packaging and waste on the Taylors Impact website.
For more information on how you can recycling your packaging in Italy, click here.
Work with us
Partner across the globe.
Tea and coffee has been what we do for a very long time, so we do it properly.