Its been hard to get motivated for the last couple of months. I have felt empty and never really present. I need to turn myself around. My disaster areas have been social and professional. I have behaved like a “turtle” — meaning I have retreated from both social and professional interactions. I have spoken about a turnaround, but have not done anything about it. I need to ACT. I can’t just stay here and do nothing.

I think one of the key things I must do is seek “purpose”. I need a higher calling for what I do. Over the last couple of days, I have been toying with the idea of using Yoobi to do good. I have been a bit disappointed with our business as of late. When I first started, I had a clear vision and purpose. One of our key tenets was “respect”. This powerful word behind our company meant that we respected our environment, community, team, customers, etc… It was not explicit, but we did want to be environmentally friendly and healthy as well — we did not want to do any harm.

But almost 10 years after we launched Yoobi, here we are, and we have done virtually nothing about both the environment and health. I do believe that our environmental footprint is absolutely horrific. We use single-use plastic like crazy throughout our operations, and we focus on delivery which generates mind-boggling amounts of waste. We literally use more than 1 palette of packaging each week. All of this plastic is single-use is immediately discarded.

And this is just the materials we use. We then source our ingredients from all over the world. We use “air-freighted” avocados, pacific tuna, Norwegian salmon, and never change our menu with the seasons. We really could not be less adaptable to our surroundings. What happened to local and seasonal produce? I remember when Caro and I had driven down to Riverford Organic farms with the idea of using local, organic, and sustainable veg. — all of this went through the door.

And then there is health. We have always touted that we were responsible when it came to health, but many things have flown out of the window. When food is one of the world’s main environmental and health culprits, we cannot simply sit by and let things go unchanged. We must act.

I believe that giving purpose to Yoobi and to what we do will reignite my fire, and give me new motivation to continue. We will be a leader on the environment and on health. We really need to be — we can do so so much good.

Once we start this transformation, this will give us a real point of differentiation and a way to communicate with our customers. It will allow us to tell beautiful stories about the environment, sourcing, recipes, nutrition, and so much more. It won’t just be about pictures of great tasting food. So many companies out there a “hollow” and “empty”. They are simply chasing a profit, and do not last. The companies which do endure, are those with a higher calling, and a real mission.

Action steps we will take:

1. Customer communication via blog, insta, social, etc…
2. Menu development together with great chefs, and nutritionists.
3. Suppliers — partnerships with local suppliers, farmers, and real producers.
4. Sustainability — trying to reduce our “food miles” as well as ensuring that all of our sourcing “check the boxes”. Working with MSC certified fish, or only with vegetables grown in the UK. Looking at alternative protein and veg. Moving away from animal produce (not eliminating) but rebalancing our menu to offer more protein-less options.
5. Operations — looking at how we can reduce our footprint. This means using less electricity, water, and resources to run our business — and potentially looking at ways to offset what we do.
6. Packaging — looking at ways to make our packaging circular or reusable so that customers don't need to immediately throw it away. Working with someone creative on coming up with ways to suggest to customers to reuse our packaging. And potentially giving the customer the option of paying a little extra to get sturdier packaging they could hold on to.
7. Nutritional revamp of our menus. Working with a nutritionist on how to make our menu healthier and allow our customers to make informed decisions by giving them 100% transparency on what the nutritionals are.
8. Organic — entering organic in a big way and communicating to our customers the % of organic ingredients we use. We could start working with Suma in a more meaningful way, and could team up with Clearspring for example to purchase their products in bulk. So for example, buying 1 ton of organic miso instead of their 250 gram retail sizes.
9. Registering as a B-Corp
10. Registering with “1% for the Planet” — this would be absolutely amazing. For example, if we would work with them, we would be giving to a cause £40,000 per year based on our current £4M runrate.
11. Carbon Footprint — calculating it, and tracking it on an ongoing basis in order to improve on it.

There are many more areas we could take the above, but this shows there is a lot of runway here. We could really start changing to world, and hopefully create a movement. We care about these causes, and I think our customers also care about these causes and this would make a tremendous difference.