Eco-Friendly Baby Food Meal Deliveries in London
Choosing the right baby meal delivery service in London can be a tricky decision for parents. Naturally, when choosing anything for your baby, there’s extra pressure to make sure that you give them the best possible start to life.
In other blog posts, we’ve spoken about the difference between all the baby food delivery services available in London and which ones might be best for you, but in this post, we’re going to look at something equally as important: Which is the most eco-friendly choice?
What is a baby food delivery service?
If you’re a new parent in London, you may have already noticed that there has been a sharp uptick in the number of parents using baby meal delivery services for their little ones.
It seems like every other day you hear about a new baby company on your local mums WhatsApp group!
Most baby meal delivery services in London are designed to try and ease the stress and workload for busy parents. Baby food is not the same as adult food, so for many parents, having to deal with cooking different meals for themselves, a baby, (and potentially older children!) is basically an impossible task without turning into a full-time chef.
They are especially popular for working parents who don’t want their child’s nutrition to be sacrificed by them having to go back to work after maternity or paternity leave.
Most work on a subscription basis, which allows you to have regular baby meals delivered so you can skip the planning, shopping, cooking and cleaning that would usually come with cooking the meals yourself.
This is why making sure the baby meal delivery service is eco-friendly should be an important consideration for parents, as you would probably be using the meals on a regular basis for your little one.
How to know which baby meal delivery services are eco-friendly?
The main things to consider when deciding which is the most eco-friendly would be:
- The packaging of the food
- The delivery method
- The locality of the ingredients
The packaging of the food:
There are 3 main ways that you’ll find baby food packaged up in the UK.
The first is probably the most prevalent because of their ultra-convenient, throw-in-the-buggy nature…you guessed it! It’s the notorious baby food pouch.
As with many ultra-convenient things in life, there is an environmental cost attached to their use due to their plastic packaging which isn’t always recyclable.
There have been recent attempts by some brands to make their packaging fully recyclable, but there remains a large amount of pouches on sale that aren’t fully recyclable.
The other, more traditional, way of packaging baby food is in glass jars. Glass is great for the environment! It’s infinitely recyclable and doesn’t contribute to microplastics in our food system.
The other common type of baby food packaging you might find is a kraft paper pot which is usually used by frozen baby food delivery companies. These are also great for the environment, but the one drawback that we’ve found in our experience is that each delivery requires a lot of insulation packaging and ice packs to keep the food frozen.
Why V&Me is the sustainable choice for baby food delivery companies in London
First of all, V&Me’s baby food packaging is designed with sustainability in mind. Everything used is either recyclable or compostable so you don’t have to worry about the environmental impact of your baby’s food. From the bag it comes in, to the pots the food is served in, nothing will end up in a landfill if disposed of correctly.
One of the other eco-credentials that V&Me has for London parents is that the food is cooked and prepared locally in Battersea. This means that the food isn’t being shipped around the country contributing excessively to road pollution levels.
In fact, because V&Me uses its own fleet of drivers, the delivery routes are optimised daily to ensure that our riders are travelling the shortest delivery routes possible to reduce congestion and pollution levels.
If you live in areas such as Wandsworth, Battersea, Clapham or Kensington, you might have already seen our eye-catching yellow delivery drivers delivering to your local area at the crack of dawn!
Why food suppliers are important factors in the eco-credentials of baby meal delivery companies in London.
It’s quite common for baby food companies to use organic suppliers for all their fresh produce. However, one of the disadvantages of this is that the produce they use in their baby food often has to travel from far overseas, contributing to high levels of C02 emissions.
This is especially true if the meals are using ingredients out of season because they will inevitably have to source the ingredients from somewhere overseas.
Next time you pick up a baby food pouch in the supermarket, take a look at where the ingredients are from and you might be surprised to find that very few are made in the UK, let alone in London!
At V&Me, we opted for a food supplier that focuses on fresh and local produce and because our menus rotate regularly, we don’t need to rely on fruit and veg that is out of season or grown on the other side of the world and shipped over.
Not only does this reduce C02 emissions, but we believe that the taste and quality of the ingredients are massively improved as a result.
We all want our baby to grow up learning to love fresh, natural seasonal produce but unless you have the time and knowledge to plan, buy and cook these things on a regular basis it can be a nearly impossible task!
How do I sign up?
If you live in London and you want to join the growing number of parents getting fresh baby meal deliveries to their doorstep, click the link below and get your first delivery now!
We are now delivering to almost all central London postcodes, including popular areas like Wandsworth, Clapham, Bromley, Kensington, Fulham, Greenwich, Queen’s Park, Islington, Lewisham and many more!
