My answer to Jan Banham’s blog question: “What is your carbon footprint when you import from South Africa?”.

The Cape fruit season explained.

Our office fruit basket and office fruit box services largely provide a northern hemisphere seasonal mix. However, given that in the winter months (November to March) there is a considerable limitation in fruit variety (only apples, pears and clementines are available from the northern hemisphere), we do break the monotony with some fruit from the Cape season from January to March.  If we didn’t do this, the fruit mix would be the same for 4 months.
 
The key fruits we like to buy from the Cape are:
• Peaches, nectarines and plums:  Jan-Mar
• Table grapes: Jan-Feb

Please note that NONE of the fruit we buy from the Cape is air-freighted. Instead, it is brought to the UK by sea-freight (the most fuel-efficient transportation method). This means that fruit grown in the natural heat of the Cape actually has less global warming potential than out-of-season British or European fruit grown in artificial, energy-intensive greenhouses.

Fruitful Office is very committed to its environmental policy, which includes planting a fruit tree in Africa for every basket or box we sell. To date, we have planted over 40,000 fruit trees under our Planting Fruit Trees in Africa campaign.

Have a fruitful weekend!

Fruit Guru

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 10:45 am and is filed under Office Fruit Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.