Provenance is at the heart of everything we do, informing not only the product choices we make and the growers and producers that we invite to join our community, but is itself the ‘essence’ that drives the ethics and values of our business and our passionate commitment to authenticity and transparency.
WHAT PROVENANCE ASSURED MEANS
Provenance Assured by Provenance Hub means that you can be sure where the foods we offer have come from, who has produced them, why they’re doing it, and how they have been grown or produced.
When we created Provenance Hub, we knew we needed to offer our customers not just the best tasting foods from across the UK and Europe, but to also verify their authenticity, with complete transparency in the production methods used to make them. Provenance Assured informs our customers and set clear benchmarks for our producer community around the standards and requirements we expect them to meet. Look out for this mark on our product pages.
Whilst we carry out exhaustive checks against all of the producers we work with, and the products that they sell, not all have yet to be awarded this mark. In these instances we will show other terms indicating their stage in the process to full Provenance Assured status, such as 'An Authentic Independent British Producer'.
Verification Checks
WHO: We need to know who we are working with and the people that run the business.
We validate the producers’ legal personality, product liability insurance, is a legitimate trading business and is compliant with local health and safety and food hygiene laws.
WHERE: We need to know that the products are authentic and as described.
We verify and validate all growing and production claims, which normally include site visits by our team, to understand where ingredients are from or how they are sourced, where production takes place, and that capacity is as expected.
WHY: We need absolute transparency.
We are looking to establish that the grower or producer shares our commitment to sustainability, authenticity, transparency and ecological wellbeing. We are looking for clear documented processes and strategies that we can witness in action.
HOW: We need to be able to share with our customers each product’s provenance story
We understand in detail how each product is made, and its growing and production techniques. We are looking for traditional, heritage, small scale production, typically tied to the producers region. We will also look to confirm that we are not seeing mass production, chemically grown, industrialised, infinite capacity or white label scenarios.
