Cook Food has launched a major programme to reformulate its ready meals and make its product development fit for a “more sustainable future”.
As part of the new initiative – called Recipes For Change – Cook has focused on “completely reimagining” its products to ensure they are more nutritious, but also more carbon-friendly, by switching to more environmentally friendly ingredients.
Cook has started by reformulating its bestselling Lasagne Al Forno product, with a new variant that has a 27% smaller carbon footprint per portion.
Made using regenerative farmed beef, from new supplier Grassroots, the new product has a smaller amount of beef, but has more vegetables and lentils. Overall, each 350g serving has 8g less fat, 28% less salt and 75% compared with the 365g serving of the classic Al Forno product.
The new variant hit freezers this week and will be trialled alongside Cook’s classic Lasagne Al Forno throughout the autumn to measure customer demand.
The launch would be supported with new vinyls and PoS in-store, as well as a dedicated webpage that tells customers more about the process behind Recipe For Change. Cook has also briefed all of its store teams so they can advise customers about the new line.
Cook is hoping to encourage around one in four of its customers to switch during the trial throughout autumn. If it works, Cook would aim to permanently switch its Lasagne Al Forno to the new recipe and roll out the principles to more of its products.
Testing customer appetite for sustainable alternatives
“Hopefully this is going to create a lot of conversation to say that this is possible to do,” said Ashley Davis, Cook chief customer & commercial officer. “We’ve shown that this is a product that’s on the shelf. If we can do that in this product, how do we then take those learnings and roll them out?”
While Cook has limited the trial to a single product, focusing specifically on beef, Davis said Cook’s size – 110 shops and more than 1,000 branded concessions plus online – would make it possible for its suppliers to innovate, whereas they previously may have avoided doing so due to costs.
“That’s a lot of the challenge. So many trials take place, but the volumes just aren’t there to make meaningful change.
“It’s quite exciting to go out to suppliers and ask ‘what else could we be doing? How can Cook’s volume enable you to do something better and support you as you start to make changes?’” she said.
Alastair Trickett, a beef farmer and co-founder of Grassroots, agreed: “Growing a bigger market for our beef is essential if we’re going to develop more nature-friendly farming that’s sustainable for farmers, too,” he said. “We love the creative approach Cook has taken to coming up with this dish.”
Potential to revolutionise product development
Even without customer buy-in, the wider Recipes for Change project had already delivered significant benefits for Cook, by enabling the business to roll out a new more detailed carbon calculation methodology, which it would use to inform future product development, it said.
Cook was now about to measure and calculate the environmental footprint of each of its individual products for the first time, which had the potential to revolutionise its approach to product development and how it communicates sustainability to customers, said the brand’s impact director, Andy Stephens.
“For our scope 3 we’d previously look at it on an ingredient level, but we weren’t able to draw down to the product level, which is where decisions happen in the business.
“In terms of communications internally and externally, we can start talking about the average product carbon footprint and how that changes over time. Rather than saying ‘our scope 3 emissions are 93,000 tonnes’, It changes it into information that people can understand,” Stephens said.
Cook had rolled the new methodology out to 200 of its products so far.
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