Adam Thompson, head of sustainability at Pip & Nut, spends most of his time on the numbers behind the UK’s biggest nut butter brand. Increasingly, though, he’s also the person explaining the maths behind its climate targets and why rapid growth makes a fixed net zero deadline harder to hit than it looks on paper.
Pip & Nut, which sells a variety of natural nut butters and healthy snacks, has built its reputation as the ethically minded challenger of the peanut butter aisle: B Corp certified, palm oil-free, built from founder Pip Murray’s market-stall beginnings into a genuine category leader.
It has also been unusually open about the fact that its current trajectory doesn’t yet get it to the net zero target it signed up to.
“We’ve got a net zero roadmap. It doesn’t get us to our net zero ambition, but that isn’t stopping us trying really hard,” Thompson says.
The maths behind the pledge
Pip & Nut registered a science-based net zero target with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in 2023, aiming for 2040.
“We’ve signed up to our net zero goals via SBTI, the science based targets,” Thompson explains, “and I think the ultimate overview of it is it’s going to be very hard for us to meet our net zero ambitions. We’re very open about that. Our impact report talks about that.”
The reason, he says, comes down to how the target is calculated. “Your net zero target is calculated based on your baseline year, which for us is 2021. Between 2021 and now, we’ve probably doubled as a business, even more maybe. And by the time we get to 2040, we think we might have multiplied by a factor of four from our baseline year.”
He puts baseline emissions at 5,265 tCO2e, rising to an estimated 23,000 tonnes by 2040 on current growth.
Because SBTi requires close to a 90 per cent absolute cut from that baseline, he argues the target effectively demands more of a growing business than a static one: “The size of our business would be a quarter of where we might be in 2040.
“So, as a business we need to go much further than sort of normal net zero requirements, just because we’re growing so fast. The mechanism itself is challenging for fast growing businesses. Whereas if you were just a stable business that basically didn’t grow much at all, it’s much more simple.”
Thompson is equally frank about how much of the target sits outside the company’s control. “Net zero also relies significantly on macro factors that we can’t influence, decarbonisation of the national grid, for example, and the sustainability of the container shipping and container freight industry.
“Our almonds come from California, our peanuts come from South America. A small business like us is not going to have any impact on the development of green technologies and sustainable fuels in sea shipping.”
As a result, he says, “there’s elements that you always know that you will not be able to cut out, which is why the residual emissions on net zero continue to be offset, but at the moment we do not have that complete line of sight to meet our 2040 ambitions.”
On where the footprint actually sits: “48 per cent of our footprint is in ingredients, and the lion’s share of that emissions are from our peanuts and our almonds.”
Because Pip & Nut owns no manufacturing of its own, he adds 99.9 per cent of the category covering a company’s wider supply chain rather than its direct operations.
Regenerative sourcing, B Corp, and choosing honesty over buzzwords
The response, Thompson says, has been to concentrate effort where the impact is greatest. “We joined a coalition in California called the Almond Project… about us working with a group of organisations, farmers, processors, other brands to understand how to make Californian almond growing more resilient via regenerative agriculture.”
A second scheme, in Argentina, runs through the SAI Platform “alongside a group of major organisations such as Mars and Ferrero,” which he says “has the ability to remove 50 per cent of the emissions from peanut growing in Argentina.” Progress so far: “last year we sourced 25 per cent of our almonds from regenerative sources. It is our ambition that by 2029 that number will be 100 per cent,” and “we should have about roughly 50 per cent of our peanut source this year from farms operating regenerative practices,” with the same 100 per cent target by 2029.
He’s candid that the term itself is loosely defined: “regenerative agriculture doesn’t have a specific definition, right? There’s nothing written down to say this is regen ag. It has general principles.”
Alongside this sits the company’s B Corp status, recertified this year. “Our B Corp certification on the new standards has been approved, and we are now certified on the new standards as of two weeks ago.”
He explains why the new framework matters more than the old one: “The new standards have created minimum requirements across the board for all different sizes of organisations. So it is no longer a case where you could possibly cherry pick and be good in some areas and not so good in others to be a B Corp.” For Pip & Nut, he says, “it is that proof, it is that certification that you are making decisions for people and planet, and not just for profit.”
He’s just as willing to admit where the company has missed its own goals. Of seven targets set out in its 2024 impact plan, “we only managed to do six of them.”
This transparency, he says, it to make sure the brand doesn’t fall into the trap of what he calls “green hushing” – FMCGs and retailers going quiet on sustainability rather than risk exposing gaps in performance.
“Green hushing is almost not saying anything about sustainability, not even leaning into some of the positive messaging because it might expose some of the negative messaging, but we want to lean into all of this,” he says. “It is more important to us to be really authentic and open about how we are communicating from a sustainability point of view than almost not communicating anything at all.”
His summary of the approach is blunt: “Sustainability is a journey. You never complete sustainability, and it’s a journey you need to be really open and honest about the challenges as well as your successes.”
Regulation is sharpening that instinct. The EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition directive – which bans unsubstantiated terms including “carbon neutral” and applies from 27 September 2026 – has already changed what’s on Pip & Nut’s packaging.
“We used to have ‘our nuts are from sustainable farms’ on our packaging, which we’ve removed recently because we haven’t got the full sort of due diligence,” Thompson says. “These claims need to be certified. So what we’re working on now with our regenerative agriculture projects is having regenerative nuts and having certified regenerative nuts.”
Supply chain resilience where costs are building
On geopolitical risk, Thompson is matter-of-fact: “We don’t source anything from that specific area, like Israel itself. We do have date syrup in our products, which is obviously a byproduct.”
The wider point, he says, is about building resilience against shocks a small business can’t predict, from “Super El Nino,” which “meant there was a very wet harvest period for peanuts in Argentina,” to “a tariff battle between the US and Europe on almonds” that didn’t materialise but could have disrupted a market where “80 per cent of the world’s almonds come from California… a chunk of them then come from Spain, and then Australia’s about 10 per cent”.
His conclusion: “All of these different kind of things where your business are a complete kind of like third party in whatever political tensions might be going on, but you might get sort of like dragged along with it as well.”
Pip & Nut has built in some flexibility, working with “four different peanut suppliers in Argentina,” though Thompson doesn’t oversell the company’s control over events: “Some of it is always going to be a little bit reactive. You can’t foresee everything.”
On pricing, he says the company has held firm this year: “From the beginning of this year, we haven’t passed on any costs to our customers or consumers. We did last year a small increase, which was our first increase for… three years before that.” He’s candid about the pressure building underneath that decision, with “almonds at their highest level for 10 years” and “not necessarily sustainable” pricing: “Unless there is a shift in almond pricing, you could easily see products containing almonds start to contribute to food inflation.”
On manufacturing, he confirms a consolidation: “All of our products are made in the UK”, peanut butter production having “moved to be manufactured in the UK in 2024” from the Netherlands, though he wouldn’t name the supplier, “because it’d be very obvious who our supplier are” in what he describes as “quite a small industry.”
Looking ahead, Thompson’s next stated priority is full traceability and packaging. “One of our biggest ambitions in the next couple of years is to gain complete supply chain traceability for all of our raw materials and packaging,” he says, citing cocoa sourced through Tony’s Open Chain, which “guarantees that our cocoa is deforestation free and paying a living wage to the farmers in West Africa” as the model he wants to extend to oats, Turkish hazelnuts and Middle Eastern rice syrup.
“It’s on our plan that by 2029, all of our snacking packaging will be fully recyclable,” though he admits “we don’t do a huge amount at the moment on sustainable packaging” while the bigger nut-sourcing projects take priority. “Sustainability is a journey,” he adds. “You’re never going to complete it.”
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