Sustainably minded friends Rich Eckersley and Dan Dawson – both originally from the north, but now settled in Riverford’s very own hometown of Totnes, Devon – wanted to enjoy organic plant-based drinks, but weren’t keen on the plastic packaging they tended to arrive in. Why couldn’t there be a traditional milk round with reusable glass bottles, but for dairy-free drinks? A year of dreaming, planning and hard work later, ReRooted was born.
“We wanted to make milks with things you can find in the kitchen, so things like dates, whole foods that have nutritional benefits, and keeping the processing levels down to retain nutrients and flavour,” says Dan.
The small team – who still make all their fresh milks by hand each week, in batches that are tasted and tweaked for perfection – delivered just in our local area before partnering with Riverford. It was a match made in heaven, for both of us: we had been searching for truly ethical organic plant milks for some time, and were thrilled to discover this fantastic business right on our doorstep (no pun intended).
And for ReRooted, access to our own delivery teams nationwide means their drinks can be enjoyed up and down the country, with no compromise to their ethics of reusable packaging. Simply leave your glass bottles out alongside with your veg box for us to collect, and we’ll return them to ReRooted to sterilise and refill.
Provenance is a huge part of the story at ReRooted. “We know where everything comes from, all the time,” say the pair.
All their ingredients are 100% organic, and sourced from award-winning ethical wholesaler Infinity Foods, a democratically run workers’ cooperative for over 40 years. Everything is grown as locally as possible, including almonds from Italy and Spain (never the vast Californian monocultures that many of us worry about when buying nut milks), Turkish dates, and European oats.
Their carefully crafted recipes use a really high proportion of the plant base – for example, their coconut drink contains four times as much coconut as most leading brands. The result is thick, creamy drinks with lots of natural flavour. They don’t use any artificial sweeteners; if the recipe needs a little sweetness, they use organic dates.
Rich and Dan’s personal backgrounds make the success of ReRooted no surprise. Dan is a former chef, and Rich founded the UK’s first ever zero-waste shop (also here in Totnes). Between them, they were perfectly equipped to source outstanding ingredients, concoct rich, flavoursome recipes, and make their business super-sustainable on every level. They use only renewable energy and electric vehicles, and are also members of ‘1% For the Planet’, donating 1% of their turnover to a different environmental organisation every year. Brilliant stuff.
