Some other brands that we love (and know you’ll love too!)

As things begin to return to normal, we know how easy it can be to slip back into old habits and return to larger retailers and brands we'd shopped with before the pandemic. However, the pandemic unfortunately wasn't as kind to a lot of smaller brands than it was to bigger ones.

In today's blog, we wanted to highlight a few of the many brands we love, and reasons you should continue to support small, especially after lockdown.

Why should you support small brands and businesses?

Small businesses have a huge economic impact since they help create more jobs, and the more you shop with them, the more likely they will need to expand and hire more staff.  This means less unemployment and more people being able to do jobs they are likely to enjoy.

Small brands are also able to provide more personable and memorable customer service experiences since they're more hands on, and will always strive to create a sense of community and closeness between its staff and customers.  A smaller business or brand is more likely to remember a repeat customer than a larger business, just because they’re able to build connections with customers much more quickly and easily.  No customer is too small!

These are some of the many brands we love and have worked with in the past, and just wanted to highlight what we love about them!

Firstly, Sweet Lounge really is more than just sweets!  They’re delicious confectionary!  Not only do they taste great, but they are also plant based and completely vegan, and like us their pouches are completely plastic free!  For us it's important to see other brands joining the plastic-free path.  Plastics don’t break down like other materials do, so for too long mankind’s solution has been to ‘dump eight million tonnes of plastic into the sea every year’, endangering and killing a lot of sea life.

By supporting brands who are plastic free and using biodegradable and recyclable materials means you can help us lower these numbers and help us protect our planet!

For any beer drinkers, you’ll love Toast! Their mission is ‘to brew great beers and spread big ideas that can change the world’. They ‘want to lead a brewing movement to eliminate bread waste and fix the food system’, with all of their profits going to charities fixing the food system . Toast are repurposing the unwanted, and making an ethical stand at the same time.  They believe in a world without waste, and so far, Toast have managed to save over 2,000,000 slices of bread as of writing this (22/6/21), which would have ended up wasted otherwise. ‘In the UK, 6.7 million tonnes of food is wasted per year which totals to costs of £10.2 billion each year’, but a brand like Toast is moving in the right direction to lowering these figures and reducing the impact it has on the environment. You can read more about food waste in Toast’s Impact Report which has a tonne of great updates about what Toast have been up to recently to make themselves carbon neutral!

Raw Gorilla produces natural keto & vegan breakfasts, snacks and chocolates, meaning you can wake up to and even snack on quality goodness. Their brand is focused on the connection we make with food, noting that ‘what we eat affects our moods, how we live affects how we feel’, having been ‘inspired by the book Green Gorilla- the searchless raw diet by the spiritual teacher Adi Da Samraj’. Here at Cajuu we could not agree more, since when it comes to cashews, we’re overly aware of all of the physical and mental health benefits they offer, so when looking at a brand like Raw Gorilla, we can’t help but align with them since who doesn’t want to feel good about what they eat? We know we certainly do!

Planthood is all about healthy, restaurant-quality plant-based meal kits that you can make at home for you and your family.  They’re ‘on a mission to make plant-based eating so delicious, healthy and easy that it becomes a new way of life’ since the way we eat ‘can have a tremendous impact on the health of our planet and everyone living on it’. Planthood make eating healthy for both yourself and the planet more accessible and easy if you’re someone who struggles to find time to prepare and cook meals from scratch.  We think this is a brilliant idea since we know how busy life can be, especially as things begin to return to normal.  Not only that, but they do free UK delivery too!

Now it's easier than ever to support your favourite small brands.

Use social media to get vocal about them online and tell others why they should check them out! Not only is it free, but social media has such a huge engagement across the world.  Follow, like and share their posts - the more engagement a brand gets, the more people who will see it which increases the chances of others finding it and wanting to support them too.

If you’ve got a brand you’ve tried and love, share your own experience with others, and help recommend the products you like.  What better way to get others to support than by telling them exactly what products they might like too.

Let us know what small brands you love and why- the more we share the more we care, and can help brands grow closer to achieving their mission!