Introduction
Our mission is to bring health and happiness to dogs and their humans, and to use our business as a force for good. As a certified B Corp, we are committed to meeting the highest standards of social and environmental transparency, accountability and impact.
This statement sets out Butternut Box's actions to understand all potential modern slavery risks related to our business and to put in place steps that are aimed at ensuring that there is no slavery or human trafficking in both our own operations and within our supply chains.
This modern slavery statement is published in accordance with the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015) and relates to actions and activities during our financial year 27 December 2022 to 25 December 2023. We will review and update this statement on an annual basis and will publish it on our website.
Our Structure
This statement has been prepared for Dogmates Ltd (trading as Butternut Box). Dogmates Ltd is a private limited company incorporated and registered in England. Our ultimate parent company is Dogmates Holdings Ltd, a private limited company incorporated and registered in England. Dogmates Holdings Ltd has one wholly-owned subsidiary: Dogmates Ltd and four indirectly wholly-owned subsidiaries: Dogmates (Ireland) Limited, Dogmates (Netherlands) B.V., Feedwell sp. z o.o and Butternut (Belgium) BV. These subsidiaries don’t meet the threshold required to have a modern slavery statement under the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015, but they are part of our Group and operate within a centralised governance framework. This statement, therefore, covers actions taken in relation to the Group.
Our Business
Founded in 2016, Butternut Box’s mission is to bring health and happiness to dogs and their humans. We are a manufacturer and retailer of fresh pet food made with human quality ingredients.
We currently trade as Butternut Box or PsiBufet in the following countries: The United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands, Belgium and Poland.
We have one manufacturing site in Doncaster, UK, where we cook, freeze, pack and store all of our meals before distributing them across all our markets. We also lease offices in London and Warsaw and co-working offices in Amsterdam and Dublin and have a workforce of ~800 people. The majority of our people work in Doncaster.
Our Responsibility
Butternut does not support or knowingly engage with any business involved in slavery or human trafficking. It is a priority for us to ensure that we operate to the highest ethical standards, source responsibly and work to prevent modern slavery throughout our business and in our supply chain. Regardless of location, we hold every team member and supplier to the same high standards of transparency, sustainability, accountability and ethics. We ensure this through our policies and due diligence.
Our Policies
We have appropriate policies in place that underpin our commitment to ensuring there is no modern slavery or human trafficking in our business or in our supply chain. We continuously review and update all our policies.
Our framework to combat modern slavery and human trafficking includes:
• Our Code of Ethics. This defines the expectations we have: to always do what’s right, to conduct ourselves with integrity, and to hold ourselves and others accountable to high standards of ethical conduct.
• Our Supplier Code of Conduct. We are committed to ensuring that our suppliers adhere to the highest standards of ethics and business practices. Suppliers are required to confirm that they provide safe working conditions where necessary, treat workers with dignity and respect, and act ethically and within the law in their use of labour. Serious violations of our supplier code of conduct will lead to the termination of the business relationship.
• Our Living Wage Commitment. As part of the Living Wage Foundation, we’re preventing modern slavery by making sure we pay everyone directly employed by us at least the living wage for the area in which they live.
• Our Risk Committee and Matrix. Our Risk Committee is responsible for assessing and managing risks associated with the company's operations, whilst our risk matrix captures all elements of business risk, including likelihood, impact and mitigation and management efforts. The Risk Committee meets and reviews risk quarterly.
• Our Equal Opportunities Policy embeds non-bias practices in hiring, as well as screening employees and past employers.
• Our Anti-Bribery policy details how we operate with openness and honesty as a business. This policy restricts any employee or person working on our behalf from giving or accepting any bribe in order to gain commercial or contractual advantage for Butternut, or in order to gain any personal advantage in a way that is unethical. We require all of our suppliers to adhere to this policy too.
• Our Whistleblowing policy and process provide a framework that lets anyone at Butternut raise concerns about a danger, risk of wrongdoing, or criminal activity (such as modern slavery) which affects others, or impacts our reputation. Our employees have the option to raise concerns anonymously internally or at our kitchens using our external provider, Spot.
Our Supply Chain
All ingredients are delivered by our suppliers to our manufacturing kitchen in Doncaster or via cold storage site in Easton, both in England. All our pet food is cooked and packed in Doncaster at Rudie’s Kitchen and workers at the Kitchens are either directly employed by Butternut Box, or are contract staff employed by a labour agency where required. Meals are then exported via third-party courier services to our international fulfilment hubs in Ireland, the Netherlands and Poland. Boxes are then delivered to our customers across all our markets by third-party courier services. All other day-to-day activities are carried out from our offices in Amsterdam, Dublin, London and Warsaw.
Our Due Diligence
Despite a streamlined supply chain, there are still risks of exploitation given a large part of our supply chain is high risk sectors such as agriculture and farming. Whilst we do our best to source as close to our manufacturing facility as we can, due to stock availability, growing seasons and price, we do source certain products and ingredients further afield.
We undertake due diligence when considering taking on new suppliers, and review our existing suppliers on a scheduled basis. Our due diligence and reviews include:
• Conducting a thorough assessment of the supplier's capabilities, reputation, and compliance with relevant laws and regulations, including the compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 (for UK suppliers) and the ETI Base Code (for non-UK suppliers); and
• Embedding ESG, including human rights and anti-bribery, into our tender and onboarding process for all new suppliers.
We also have in place systems to mitigate the risk of slavery and human trafficking occurring in our supply chains, monitor potential risk areas in our supply chains and protect whistleblowers.
Supplier adherence to our values and ethics
We have zero tolerance to slavery and human trafficking. To ensure all those in our supply chain and contractors comply with our values and ethics we have a supply chain compliance programme. Our Code of Conduct and Responsible Sourcing Standard is based on the Global Social Compliance Programme Reference Code, and we also conduct an annual raw material and vulnerability risk assessment.
Our focus areas for the next 12 months
Ensuring our supply chains remain free from the risk of modern slavery and human trafficking, we must ensure we continually improve our own processes. Some of the ways we are looking to tackle this are listed below.
• Ensuring a large proportion of our key suppliers are registered and have completed a self-assessment questionnaire on our Integrated Management System;
• Rolling out modern slavery training for teams with a close link to our supply chains;
• Conducting supplier audits which have a greater degree of focus on slavery and human trafficking where general risks are identified; and
• Our longer term aim is to be able to give preference to suppliers and business partners that meet standards across wider sustainability, including but not limited to BRC and Fairtrade.
Board Member Approval
This statement was approved on 11 December, 2024 by our Board of Directors, who review and update annually.