An Ulverston business owner is to rub shoulders with national brands as she speaks at a key sustainability event in London.
Shed 1 Gin, a small batch craft gin producer on the edge of the Lake District, will be lining up alongside national brands including Innocent Drinks and Tesco at a key sustainability event in London this Friday – World Earth Day.
The Future Summit 2022 is bringing together some of the country’s most inspirational food and drink founders to share how they have successfully made impactful changes to their businesses.
Representatives from more than 20 personally invited businesses will be sharing their knowledge and experience of building sustainability values into the core of their business.
Shed 1 Gin co-owner and founder, Zoe Arnold-Bennett will be part of a panel discussing the subject of Decarbonising Your Business: The Easy Wins.
With Shed 1 being a proud climate-positive business, Zoe will share the challenges and successes they experienced as a small business on the road to becoming climate positive, and their ongoing efforts to continue to improve their environmental practices.
The panel will look at how SMEs in particular can calculate their carbon footprint and will highlight some quick wins on the route toward net-zero/climate positive status.
Since founding Shed 1 in 2016, Zoe and her husband Andy have implemented a number of green initiatives including saving hundreds of thousands of litres of water each year by using a closed-loop cooling system in their gin distilling.
The award-winning distillery is completely plastic-free in all packaging, operates a charity bottle return scheme, and reuses every piece of cardboard that comes through the doors as packaging for customer orders.
They even turn all of the excess fresh citrus fruit from the gin creation process into homemade gin gelly marmalade, which is sold to raise money for local charities.
This year has seen the couple add palette planters onto the walls and fences around the distillery in which they have started to grow some of their own botanicals to use in their gins and on customer gin-making experiences.
Zoe said: “It’s always an honour to be asked to speak at important events like this one that shines the spotlight on sustainability and helps to encourage more SMEs to be greener.
“When you’re a small business, there are always extra challenges to face as the climate change narrative and any available funding to drive change tends to be aimed toward big businesses. We started our business in a 7×7 foot garden shed, you couldn’t get much smaller!
“Our resources were really limited, but from the outset, we knew we wanted to do what we could to promote environmentally sound practices. It’s all about starting small – for us, it was our packaging – and it will grow from there.”
The Future Summit 2022 takes place at Conway Hall in London from 9am-6pm on Friday.
