Choithram - balancing business and the environment

T. Choithram & Sons is a Corporate Club member of WWF UAE - a demonstration of the company's support for conservation.

WWF chats with L.T. Pagarani, Chairman, T. Choithram & Sons LLC, on wide ranging issues impacting our lives and our planet 'Natural' foods and 'organic;' plastic carrier bags and recycling water; wasteful packaging and conserving energy....in a candid, one on one, he talks about how environmental concerns figure in their business operations.


WWF: Tell us about your company's environmental policy.
L.T. Pagarani: The majority shareholder of the Choithram Group is a Trust. A part of the Trust's objectives is to work with humanity which is, basically, to provide medical care, education and environmental solutions for the less privileged amongst us.

I am sure you hear of similar objectives from many organisations; but we work pretty hard to fulfil our obligation.

Most of our work is in Africa and India where we have a couple of hospitals and schools. In 2002, we set up a water recycling system in Indore (in central India), to recycle hospital waste. We did this so as not to impose on the domestic population's main water source - the river. There was some controversy about the purity of the recycled water, but we demonstrated through an independent audit that it was clean and the whole system worked. Presently we recycle about 80, 000 gallons a day, and are working to increase that.

In Dubai we are successfully recovering water through the A/C circuit; and are looking at taking this technology to the hospital in Indore. It is a large, 400-bed hospital, with its air circulation, cooling systems, laundry...all generating a lot of water as a by-product.

Are you into the business of organic foods?
Yes, we are trying to work with organic materials... but there is a bit of a commercial business motive to that. Our UK business supplies major retailers like Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda (Walmart) with natural and health foods - work which is very different from our Dubai operations. In fact, we have always been doing natural food products -- much before 'organic' started edging into the mainstream.

Now, we have begun growing things like soybeans, certain strains of wheat and chillies in India...without using pesticides. If we succeed in terms of yield, we can ship the produce, package it and then, sell it. We have faced a number of setbacks... but we're not giving up. Quite the contrary.

What about your UAE operations?
With respect to our business here, we reflect the customers we work with. There are tremendous challenges; and they are very difficult to prevail upon. One of them, of course, is the use of plastic carrier bags.

In this respect, we've improved our monitoring and control of how easily bags are given or taken or disappear. It's a difficult issue to tackle. People walk out with shopping held in several carrier bags, and some of these may have just one item! This is partly because you want to keep chilled products or meat products separately, as you don't have the protection of a temperate climate. We actually have access to data, store by store, and can study consumers' behavioural pattern. We've managed to be a bit more regulating in specific stores.

Also, in all supermarkets we have changed the pattern in which we allow access to other types of bags. In the fruit and vegetable areas we've invested in dispensers that allow you to pull only one bag at a time. Earlier, it was very much a help yourself system. We are also concerned about packaging which, unfortunately, is increasing rather than becoming less. But we are trying to do whatever we can; for example, we have very unglamorous packaging in our bakeries.

They are brown paper bags that are locally made, don't have any branding on them, no plastic windows...and all the rest. Thus, not having a sales pull, we are always being told to change our packaging. In fact we should communicate why we should not!

About 'green' materials that we sell in our stores...we are a bit dependent on the supply chain for that. We do keep recycled paper stationery and some of our packaging is recycled materials, but the progress is not as rapid as we'd like to see.

Don't you sell organic foods in your UAE stores?
I am not happy with the foods labelled 'organic.' Not only do they reach us in a much depleted condition but also, to keep them lasting requires an enormous amount of energy. Our UK business is 100 per cent 'natural' foods that are moving very fast. We bring the same natural foods to our stores here, but don't label them 'organic.' Perhaps that is our failing.

But some of the 'non-organic' foods we supply are actually more organic than those labelled 'organic.' Fresh vegetables from Pakistan, for example carrots, are incomparably superior to the organic stuff that comes from elsewhere. Dried apricots, which we very successfully bring in from Afghanistan, are intrinsically organic.

They may come in poor packaging, but are far better than anything that has the 'organic' label. The pine nuts we keep are collected in a traditional way, and not harvested in a modern sense. In addition, we have cashew nut trading in a number of countries; and we are involved in it through all stages - right from the harvesting of raw nuts to the stage of what you eat in the cinema! We are, perhaps, the only people in the world selling cholesterol-free cashew nuts. And it has taken us one heck of time to make the product viable.

Do you have environmental concerns while sourcing your products?
That is a very important thing. Yes, we are looking at the way we source products. Flowers, for instance. I was distressed to learn that the transportation of flowers around the world, from point to point, from field to final destination, is highly inefficient in terms of energy consumption.

And yet flowers are meant to be expressive of fresh and all things nice. I might add that we are careful about the way we dispose of our own waste and the monitoring of wastage. This is probably not a 'headline grabbing' thing, but I think that it is an effective way of playing a role. With paper products there is quite a good secondary market or support system for UAE residents to dispose of their waste.

What does an associate with WWF mean to you?
Let's say our charter, one of our reasons for operating as a business is that the profits can support our charitable Trust. So an association with WWF or MSF or other organisations like that is a very complementary role for us. It isn't anything we champion or like to market. It is consistent with our thinking.

Is there an environmental achievement that you are particularly happy about?
My favourite is a very small one actually. It is the campaign that we did with students of the Choithram School in central India. It was an awareness campaign by children to get people to change their habits during Diwali, such as not disposing painted, plastic moulded idols (modern ones are not made using the traditional clay method) in the river and so introducing chemical impurities into the water.

Doing away with plastic pouches for 'prasad' (offerings) was another. At the same time, our 'burns unit' found an alternative treatment for treating burn bruises. They used potato skins instead of ones with animal ingredients; and it worked very well.

What are you doing to raise awareness among your customers?
We are initiating a campaign called 'health-wise' in November '03 the focus of which is well being and how you live. The programme cuts across all sections of our business - confectionary, fresh foods, dry foods and the rest.

It has been a difficult thing for us to evolve because of concerns that it may impact the sales of other products, so we have had to create internal partnerships and take cognisance of this.