Oé, a year ago, we were proud to announce that we were B Corp certified again. And that's not all, for the past year, we have been constantly looking for ways to reduce our impact on the planet. We take this label very seriously and we are increasingly committed to the environment. Today, we decided to take stock with you of everything we have put in place this year, since January. Let's go !
The B Corp Label
B Corp or Benefit Corporation is the label for companies created for the common good. B Corp companies are labeled for a period of three years, and show their progress to maintain it. To be labeled B Corp, a company must respect or strive for the best on the following subjects:
- Transparency with customers and employees,
- The production of values and impact for customers and consumers,
- The preservation of the environment, the improvement of its sustainable management and its impact on earth,
- The investment of time and resources for the social and economic well-being of its community,
- Participation in the social, professional and financial well-being of employees.
A B Corp company has missions and ethics to respect. Oé's missions are clear: to promote organic agriculture that respects the environment, to raise awareness in our community of environmental issues and to find alternatives for responsible consumption and production.
Many companies are labeled B Corp , such as Patagonia , Ulule, Innocent, Bjorg Bonneterre. In France, we are 145 companies to be certified and we are one of the 4000 companies to have this label in the world. We are very proud to belong to this ecosystem which acts for the common good. The label is effective for three years and to keep it, we must show our improvements and our initiatives taken during these three years.
Our certification dates from 2017 and we were recertified last year with a score of 16.3 points more than in 2017, which gives us 97.9 points. Nice, right? If we have been recertified, it is thanks to all the efforts of the past three years. To justify our certification, we have implemented several actions to respect the environment and to offer good organic and pesticide-free wines to our consumers:
- We have chosen to supply our premises with green energy thanks to Enercoop,
- We are moving towards carbon neutrality thanks to our carrier, which plants trees to offset its greenhouse gas emissions,
- We have also set up the Oé program for biodiversity, for which we allocate 1% of our turnover to support our winegrowers in their projects.
- Our wine bottles come from deposit and reuse, our corks come from FSC forests in Portugal .
And as we want to keep pushing the envelope even further, we are implementing many other actions that we are talking about just below!
Oé, company with a mission
In 2020, we decided to become a company with a mission to enshrine our mission in the company's statutes and give ourselves a course, a line of sight to reach the destination we want: a world in harmony with its environment. A company with a mission is a company that sets environmental and social objectives in its main missions and acts for the good of the community. By becoming a company with a mission, we extend our commitments and roll up our sleeves to find ever more eco -responsible solutions in our operations. To do this, we are implementing several actions, including the launch of the Oé Program for biodiversity, zero-waste logistics and the deployment of deposits with our partners throughout France.
Do you want to know more about our mission-driven company status? It's here !
The Oé Program for Biodiversity
By launching the Oé Program, our goal is to support our winegrowers to always go beyond organic in their projects to promote biodiversity. This year, we are taking a step forward by partnering with EcoFarms and the crowdfunding platform MiiMOSA to help our winegrowers.
EcoFarms is an agency that assesses the sustainability of farms. She visits organic vineyards and analyzes their operation . EcoFarms then draws up an assessment and makes recommendations to winegrowers to promote biodiversity in the vineyard. MiiMOSA is a crowdfunding platform dedicated to agriculture and food.
This year, our winegrowers Franck and Véronique in Pujols had the honor of being the first to benefit from funds from the Oé Programme. EcoFarms visited their farm and offered them areas for improvement, such as (among others) planting hedges and an agroforestry plot. Thanks to the Oé Program and MiiMOSA, we launched a crowdfunding campaign to help them achieve this goal. Our winegrowers are committed to the planet every day, so we decided to help and support them in their projects.
Want to know more about our campaign? It's this way !
Zero Waste Logistics
With Sonia and Thomas (alias Thompé) from our logistics department, we have been developing zero waste logistics for a year. Our goal is to achieve no more waste for our packaging and the delivery of your parcels.
We decided to have our bottler deliver labels in bulk so as not to throw away plastic unnecessarily. The glassines, the thin sheets on which the labels are affixed, are recyclable and unnecessary waste is avoided. We receive our bottles in bulk in wooden crates and boxes to limit our use of pallets, cardboard and plastic. And thanks to our Lyon partner Rebooteille, we deliver our bottles to our grocery stores, wine shops and restaurants in Lyon in reusable lockers instead of single-use boxes.
We have also optimized the composition of our boxes and labels so that there is less waste when cutting our boxes and facilitate label degradation during washing. We are always looking for more consistency in our actions and our commitments and what is great is that each member of our team participates in this effort! Last October, Sonia and Thompé managed to ship our first zero waste pallet. A great victory that will call for others. If you want to keep up with our progress on zero waste logistics, you can take a look at our permanent Supply 0 waste story on Instagram.
Deposit and reuse of wine bottles
Last year, we revived the practice of depositing wine in France. We relaunched the deposit, starting with the Lyon region to develop nationally. The principle of the deposit is to reuse our bottles after use. You buy your bottle in one of our points of sale, and after a good tasting of one of our organic wines, you return it to the store where it will be stored and sent to a washing center to be used again.
To put in place the wine deposit throughout France, we relied on many players: distributor partners, our points of sale throughout France and collection and washing partners. For the collection and washing our bottles, we are surrounded by partners such as Rebooteille in Lyon, Ma bouteille s’appelle revient in the Drôme, Bout' à Bout' in Nantes and Rennes , Uzaje in Paris and Lille and many others. We work hand in hand with more and more local partners in each region and we are proud to say that more than 1⁄3 of our points of sale offer the deposit. And we don't stop there. Our goal is to ensure that all our bottles come from deposit and reuse.
With our partner Jean Bouteille, we are setting up a bulk wine offer in some of our sales points. For the moment we distribute three references of Mediterranean wine, a white, a red and a rosé, all produced by Brice, winemaker Oé in Arles for the pleasure of your taste buds.
Go to your bulk wine points of sale here!
We do not intend to stop on such a good path. We will always go further to push our commitments and go after our mission: doing right by doing good. See you soon for the rest of the Oé adventures!
