We use the Social Impact Toolkit developed by Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), to help us understand the role we play in our communities, in particular the impact we make on the lives of our customers and the people who work with us.

Social Impact for our Customers

Reshaping the food system can’t happen by focussing purely on production and distribution, it also requires inspiring people to make changes in their own lives, and supporting them to make it easier to changes habits that have often formed over a long time, whether they want to switch to a more healthy diet, to support their own values, or to enjoy more local, seasonal food. When we talk about impact for customers, it’s about finding out why people shop with Locavore, what benefits they get from choosing us, and what else they’d find enjoyable or useful to help support those choices.

These types of impact were explored in the 2020 Social Impact study conducted in partnership with the Real Farming Trust and CAWR, which also helped us better understand the reasons why people connect with Locavore and our mission. The results and analysis of this survey can be downloaded here.

The Impact Project launched in January 2020, shortly before the first Covid-19 lockdowns in March, and in response to this an additional study was run asking customers how they were affected, the changes to their shopping, cooking and consumption, and how we could help. We produced this information sheet summarising the results.

Social Impact for our Teams

Our mission to reshape the food system appeals to a wide range of people who want to work with us to make this change, and we’re lucky to have a team dedicated to achieving our goals whilst selling great food and drink. We also want to make sure that as we grow, we are able to support our people in their own development and provide a great place to work.

To explore this relationship with those who work with us, we introduced Growing People, a programme of activity including an annual Staff Satisfaction Survey, giving everyone an opportunity to anonymously report how they feel about us as employers, the conditions that we provide and the reasons why they choose to work with us. In our 2021 survey the most frequently occurring score was 8 out of 10 for happiness at work, and 86% saying they feel part of a positive work culture. The results have been used to form the rest of our programme developing our teams as we go through a stage of geographical expansion.

Growing People also covers our recruitment and employment practices, and we have recently completed a Gender Pay Gap exercise, the results of which showed that 63% of employees in the upper pay quartile identify as female, with results closer to parity in the remaining 3 quartiles. We are currently extending our monitoring of Equality and Diversity with the introduction of anonymised reporting as part of our recruitment process, which will be matched with an annual survey of our teams to explore the openness of our recruitment and how we can best support diversity in our workforce.