Vitacress moves to peat free grown salad cress

By implementing a new method of salad cress production, Vitacress, the UK’s leading producer of fresh herbs, moves to growing salad cress on wood pulp. From this month, Vitacress will offer a sustainable, environmentally friendly salad cress punnet for their UK retailers and food service customers.

Numerous studies undertaken by Vitacress have consistently identified the wood pulp substrate to be the optimum method of crop production. With a stronger water holding capacity than previous production methods, the new wood pulp substrate offsets cress dehydration, ensuring a longer and healthier plant life.

Removing peat from Salad Cress production is an important step forward in the process of completely removing peat from the Vitacress business by the Government deadline of 2030. The carbon benefits are twofold, firstly the CO2 that was released from collecting peat is avoided and secondly the new substrate requires less transportation, which will reduce lorry loads from 13 to just 3 per year. The chosen substrate is a completely natural material, created by processing of pine trees grown with a sustainable planting system, for every tree harvested during the production, another three trees are planted.
Scoring high in appearance, texture and overall liking, Leatherhead Food Research found that many consumers regarded the new wood pulp substrate to be environmentally friendly and cleaner within the household.

Vitacress have been growing UK salad cress for over 40 years and supply around 12 million punnets to UK retailers and food service customers.

For more information:
Edie Methven
Vitacress Herbs press office
Tel: 0044 1189 475956
Email: freshherbs@ceres-pr.co.uk