Sustainability Initiative by TIO Farms

Fresh Fruit & Vegetables is one of the main priorities of TIO Farms, which offers cross-sector solutions on the living standards, conditions of employment, agrochemical use and climate change problems of smallholder farmers.

Every new delivery poses a new challenge - having huge consumer demand for imported fruits, we couldn't let ourselves blinded by the low priced un-ethical imported produce. Doing our due diligence with every vendor we had to switch states to get to the bottom of this!

There are a range of environmental issues facing the fruit and vegetables industry around the supply chains. Farm-level concerns include access to input financing, insufficient knowledge of sustainable social and environmental policies, low yields, bad quality, food protection, limited exposure to industrial agriculture and lack of knowledge of the requirements of the foreign market.

Main sustainability issues targeted

• Small holder farmer inclusion
• Health and safety
• Food safety
• Water sustainability

Thanks to healthy lifestyles in the West and an increasing middle class in developed countries, the global demand for fruit and vegetables has risen in recent years. The whole fruit and vegetable industry needs to follow more efficient methods of processing to satisfy this increased demand.

The curiosity in understanding where goods come from and under what circumstances they are made has also raised customer knowledge about how their transactions impact the social conditions of millions of factory and farm workers worldwide.

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In 2020, TIO Farms, along with 15 producers, 33 retailers and 100s of consumers, made a commitment to source only sustainable international produce to resolve these concerns. Today, we are proud to launch our Premium & Sustainably Sourced Range, which will become a pan-India venture with over 100 partners in the coming years, including manufacturers, brands, merchants and civil society organisations from Europe, the United States, China, South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom.

How does Sustainability Initiative by TIO Farms drive impact?

Sustainable production is described as meeting one social and one environmental compliance standard included in our 'Sustainability Criteria' specifications. The Sustainability Criteria helps to drive the harmonization of regulatory standards through the benchmarking of standards and to minimize audit duplication for production.

1. Identify

The Sustainability Criteria is used by the TIO family members to assess success against the goal of 100% sustainable imports of fruit and/or vegetables from Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

2. Who can use it
Import partners use the Sustainability Criteria which can be used by all
supply-chain owners. It can also act as an international relation to the sourcing of every private or public stakeholder with ties to the vegetables and fruit market.

Sustainability Criteria's

• Social
• BSCI
• ETI/SMETA
• Fairtrade FloCert
• IMO Fair for Life and For Life
• SA 8000
• SAN/Rainforest Alliance
• SIZA
• Sustainably Grown
• Environmental
• USDA Organic
• Leaf Marque
• GLOBALG.A.P. Crops
• EU Organic Farming
• Bio Suisse

How to use it

As a retailer, you ask your vendors to supply producers/farmers with fruits and vegetables that are audited/certified with at least one of the social certificates, or one of the environmental criteria used in the Sustainability Criteria while  located in countries of high risk (according to the BSCI countries' Classification of Risk). When determining the sourcing policies, you can use the Sustainability Criteria as a guide.

As a trader and retailer, your sustainably sourcing outcome will depend on the volumes traded from those producers/farmers located in a risk country.
The producer/farmer should be certified/audited for at least one of the social and one of the environmental requirements included in the Sustainability Criteria to be classified as sustainable quantities.

The producer/farmer should be certified/audited for at least one of the social and one of the environmental requirements included in the Sustainability Criteria to be classified as sustainable quantities.