At P & M we are attracting national recognition for our sustainability strategy Project Acorn. We are now celebrating our latest achievement in winning Business Climate Initiative at the Cold Chain Sustainability Awards 2025. On March 20th industry professionals from across the UK gathered at the University of Warwick for the annual Cold Chain Climate Summit where we picked up a prestigious award for using the Stickerbook software platform to raise climate awareness with our teams.
The Cold Chain Federation (CCF) is committed to promoting energy efficiency, reducing emissions, and fostering a more sustainable future. Part of its work involves championing businesses that are embedding best practice to support decarbonisation. In 2023, The P & M Group Sustainability Manager Joanne Swift won the inaugural Cold Chain Climate Champion Award and was shortlisted the following year.
In 2025 we were joint winners in the category for Business Climate Initiative. We used the awards as an opportunity to showcase how we are investing in a staff sustainability training initiative to raise awareness about some of the greatest environmental and social issues, whilst educating colleagues about what we are doing to address them and how they can get involved to amplify our positive impacts.
To help implement our strategy, we have teamed up with Stickerbook, a digital platform designed to simplify and enhance sustainability education by transforming complex sustainability concepts into interactive, gamified micro-learning experiences. Users learn in bite-sized chunks as the platform uses short videos to bring topics to life and share the knowledge and practical tips people need to deliver positive impacts. The shortness of learning videos has helped our teams to fit the training around their busy day jobs.
Our award application highlighted how we have used the learning stickers to engage employees on a range of topics including Biodiversity in the Built Environment, Waste and Recycling and the Circular Economy. Colleagues have welcomed the opportunity to build on their knowledge base and share their ideas about how we as a business can best embrace sustainable practice.
Beyond receiving the award, The Cold Chain Climate Summit also allowed P & M to share best practice with the wider sector. CCF invited Joanne Swift to take part in a discussion about the challenges of sustainable leadership. She joined a panel with Rebecca Cutter from B Corp certified Golden Acre Foods and previous Climate Champion Award winner Dr Rob Lamb from Star Refrigeration to explore the challenges businesses face in embedding sustainability initiatives.
"We are absolutely over the moon to have been selected as joint winners of the award for our Stickerbook initiative. It’s a fantastic platform with connections to prestigious organisations such as Cambridge University and IEMA, meaning that the information within the platform is of the highest quality and accuracy. With the added benefit of being able to create custom training videos on topics specific to our business, it’s accelerated sustainability understanding across the business since we launched it in October 2024. The desire to provide training company wide has been on our sustainability roadmap since it was first created in 2022, so it’s great to see it come to fruition in such a successful way. Being recognised for it with a national award from the Cold Chain Federation has put the cherry on top!”
“The Cold Chain Federation is excited to celebrate the remarkable achievements of this year’s winners, these individuals and organisations are leading the way in sustainable innovation, demonstrating that environmental responsibility can be aligned with business success… Together, they are driving the movement towards a greener, more sustainable future for the UK cold chain sector. It is fantastic to see their unwavering commitment to creating a better, greener future for the cold chain industry.”
Interventions such as Stickerbook are helping P & M ensure that Project Acorn sits at the heart of our business strategy. To learn more about our achievements and future Road Map, read our Sustainability Report 2024 and Emissions Update 2024, which you can download here.