Sustainable Business | Cookie Time Limited

Cookie Time Limited is an iconic New Zealand, family owned company. Founded in 1983, it has a proud New Zealand made heritage and is passionate about making great tasting quality products with real ingredients. Traditional values around real, authentic food – made with ingredients you would find in a home pantry, are married with entrepreneurship and commitment to ongoing innovation in production, distribution, online and retail.

Cookie Time is committed to sustainable business practices and reducing our environmental footprint. The common definition of sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. There are three pillars within this: social, environmental and economic, often referred to as people, planet and profits.

Our definition of sustainability encompasses this, and involves making ongoing improvements and planet friendly choices in our business. It also includes giving back to the community through our Cookie Time Charitable Trust, established in 2003 to support New Zealand children to discover their gifts. We’re also proud to support KidsCan’s work in providing for children affected by poverty so they can participate in learning and have an opportunity for a better future.

A Reduction Journey

Cookie Time Limited

Sustainability is a journey, always making incremental improvements and striving to do better, applying a sustainability lens and framing business decisions in terms of years and even decades rather than what might be expedient now.

We’ve been working behind the scenes for many years to ‘help the planet’ and reduce our environmental footprint, through reductions in water usage, cleaning chemicals, product packaging and materials waste, plastic bag usage, cellotape usage and power consumption. We’ve eliminated gas powered forklifts, and increased our recycling. You can see more about these measures in the REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE section below. In April 2021 we appointed an independent company to audit the business and provide us with further feedback on improvements we can make. Once this audit is complete, we will also set a carbon neutral goal for our operations.

A Passion for Plant Based

In 2015 we initiated a plant based product development strategy to move our business further into the plant based space, a space we are passionate about in terms of health and environmental benefits. Cookie Time co-owner Guy Pope-Mayell and creative conductor Suzanne Pope-Mayell switched to plant based eating some years ago, and are spearheading this move.

Plant based eating is becoming more mainstream, and brings a wealth of benefits for the planet, including lesser environment impacts in producing the ingredients we use. Most of our ingredients are already plant-based, and our policy is to focus on real ingredients and avoid artificial flavours, colours and preservatives as much as possible.

We have now launched three plant based products – OSM Everyday Nutrition Bars, The Original Craft Bar from OSM, and a plant based version of our famous Cookie Time Original Chocolate Chunk Cookie. These products embody clean plant based snacking and treat options, and you can expect to see more of this from us. At every step in our product development, whether an entirely new product or a new formulation of an existing product, we are now challenging ourselves to consider and source more plant based ingredients. Watch this space for more exciting developments to come.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Children’s cartoon character Bob the Builder was on the money with his ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra, and we apply that throughout our business. Some of our major initiatives are as follows:

Since 2019 we’ve reduced our water usage by 200,000 litres, and going forward we’ve targeting an annual saving of 2.5 million litres. A large part of the reduction has come from recent moves to biosteam cleaning and commissioning new commercial dishwashing facilities. Biosteam cleaning has also allowed us to reduce cleaning chemicals usage, with an annual goal of a 13,000 litre reduction.

In the bakery, we’re continually monitoring wastage and implementing measures for constant and never-ending improvements, from catch trays under the baking line to more efficient packaging film changeovers. Our annual goal is a 21,684kg reduction.

By removing plastic liners from some of our products, and reducing single plastic bags we’ve eliminated 240,000 bags from the business and since February 2020, we’ve eliminated 115,000 metres of plastic cellotape, replacing it with paper tape. Power consumption has been reduced by reconfigured our baking tray towers to bake more in each batch. Gas powered forklifts have been replaced with electric forklifts.

Recycling is top of mind, both in terms of our production processes and our end product. Within the bakery operation, we recycle cardboard and plastic, at 35,000 kgs annually. And we recycle more than 10,000 flour and sugar bags annually. Product wrappers can be recycled through the Soft Plastics Recycling Scheme, which has collection bins in supermarkets and retail premises throughout New Zealand. Find out more at https://www.recycling.kiwi.nz/solutions/soft-plastics. We also use other materials which are recyclable or get a second life, for example our Christmas Cookies buckets are recyclable but are also often repurposed as peg baskets, toy storage, paint tins, sandcastle buckets etc. Our retail tins are perfect for refilling for ongoing use. We also use cardboard packaging for a range of retail products.