Staples

About Staples

Staples Vegetables is a family-owned fresh produce business, dedicated to farming, and producing quality fresh vegetables in a safe and sustainable manner.

Where we started

The family began farming in the 1950s, growing brassicas in the rich, silty soil of the Lincolnshire fens, to supply quality cauliflowers, spring greens, cabbages and Brussels sprouts to the large wholesale markets throughout the country.

Today, the family still farms at the same site in Lincolnshire, as well as Suffolk and the Isle of Wight. Staples are specialists in green vegetable production, supplying Waitrose with a variety of fresh, quality produce grown in a selection of locations around the UK, each having varied climatic conditions, which complement each other through the season, enabling us to maximise UK seasonality.

The farm has changed a great deal over the last sixty years. However, our commitment to producing fresh, tasty, safe and sustainable food remains the same.

Providing a greener future

As the Staples family farm has grown, so too has our demand for energy and water.

EnergyStaples commissioned its first ADplant in 2010, and a second in 2013. These utilise all the unsold farm crops, reducing waste and now produce 7Mw of green energy. We are 100% self-sufficient in green electricity and heat and export the surplus electricity to the national grid. The end product from the biogas plants, digestate, is an organic fertiliser incorporated back into the soil, increasing soil organic matter and fertility. It is a sustainable cycle, a product that starts on the farm and finishes on the farm. Staples has also uniquely invested in absorption chilling technology. This enables heat produced from the biogas plant to be converted into refrigeration, which is used to cool our packing facilities, which helps to maintain product quality and increases shelf life for the customer.

WaterStaples now have 22 winter fill reservoirs spread across our UK farms, reducing the need for summer abstraction, and providing a resilient, environmentally sustainable water supply, to cope with the ever more unpredictable extreme weather patterns.

Staples Vegetables is proud to have received the 2012 Waitrose Award in recognition of our ‘Technical Excellence’ in Fresh ProduceFarming.