The challenge: embedding a culture of sustainable purchasing

With no central procurement team at innocent, office goods are purchased by a wide range of people with differing levels of knowledge of sustainability. innocent drinks asked Bioregional to help embed a culture of sustainable purchasing across its many offices by creating simple and easy-to-follow sustainable buying criteria.

How we helped: creating sustainable procurement guidelines

We focused on the most frequently purchased products and split them into:

• Office consumables, such as stationery, food and IT
• Office fit-out, such as furniture, lighting and hardware
• Marketing and merchandise, such as giveaways, signage and event consumables.

We then developed both best practice and minimum criteria for each product, which helped provide flexibility.

To help educate and inspire employees, for each of the above three areas we created overarching sustainability principles to consider and explained the key impacts of the products.

We also provided product examples using accessible and tangible language, backed up with a jargon-busting glossary.

The impact: making it easy and engaging for employees

With a more consistent approach to sustainable procurement and better informed staff, innocent has now created an interactive online version of the guidelines where employees can click on different products to see their relevant sustainability criteria.