Trade Associations: Collaboration is Key to Achieving Net Zero

NHS Supply Chain, in partnership with the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England, have been reinvigorating how we work with the Trade Associations that represent many of our 1500 suppliers.

Historically, our Trade Association engagement at an organisation-wide level has been principally with those representing the medical categories. We are now looking to broaden these relationships to include the bodies representing our non-medical suppliers including food, facilities and cleaning.

It is especially important, as we look to change the dynamic of this engagement, that all sectors are included in these overarching conversations, as well as through their engagement with specific category buying teams.

Looking to the food industry, Jim Winship, Director of the British Sandwich & Food to Go Association, shares his thoughts on the importance of taking a collaborative approach to reaching net zero.

Sandwiches are one of the most complex food products on the market, involving the assembly of hundreds of ingredients, plus all the challenges of distributing products with a shelf-life of just two or three days.

Against this background, helping suppliers align with the NHS net zero ambition (reaching net zero by 2040 for the emissions the NHS control directly, and by 2045 for the emissions the NHS influence) between now and 2030 involves major challenges, particularly at Scope 3 level (which depends on suppliers meeting similar targets), given the number and complexity of the supply chains. It also involves considerable management time. 

Added to this, without uniform guidance about how emissions should be calculated, and you have a recipe for confusion and inaccuracy on a large scale – hardly the result we all want. 

I firmly believe that if we are to seriously tackle issues such as climate change, we have to do so together for the benefit of generations to come.

Jim Winship, Director of the British Sandwich & Food to Go Association

As a way of overcoming this, the British Sandwich & Food to Go Association has taken up the challenge by co-ordinating a collaborative approach to tackling the challenges. With the support of manufacturers, suppliers and retailers, it has set the goal of developing a comprehensive library of ingredients and their carbon footprint that the industry can use to calculate their Scope 3 emissions.

To do this, we are in the process of recruiting a university to work with our members to develop a single methodology for calculating emissions for the industry that can be used both by manufacturers and their suppliers to create a standardised approach across the sector. This facility will then be applied to calculate the emissions of all the core ingredients used by the industry, as well as to help businesses calculate their Scope 1 and 2 emissions. 

In addition, the British Sandwich & Food to Go Association is looking to develop an auditing programme to provide an independent assessment and certification to back this up. 

As well as providing a consistent approach for those directly involved in the project, the aim is to share the resources across the industry, so that even small businesses without the technical resources available to them can benefit.

This collaborative approach means that the industry can develop a meaningful and cohesive approach to achieving net zero and share the costs of getting there.

Furthermore, the same collaborative approach is also being considered for other areas of common interest where there are benefits from sharing resources that do not tread over the line into commercial competitiveness, such as the sharing of research and technical food safety developments and experiences.

We are fortunate that ours is a young industry and those involved are, perhaps, less constrained and more open to change than some industries. Of course, there are cost benefits in sharing resources but it has been particularly refreshing to see the openness of the discussions between people, and the general willingness to share information for the benefit of the industry as a whole.

Jim Winship, Director of the British Sandwich & Food to Go Association