Beyond Veg Boxes: Inside Riverford’s Sustainable Tech Story

What happens when a company famous for its organic veg boxes applies the same sustainable mindset to IT?

In this episode, Julie Bishop sits down with David Eagle, Head of IT at Riverford Organic Farmers, to explore how the business lives its values through technology, not just farming.

Riverford is an employee-owned, B Corp-certified business that’s leading the way in ethical and sustainable operations. Behind the scenes, their IT team plays a huge part in reducing carbon, supporting co-owners, and making greener tech decisions every day.

David shares how Riverford:

🌱 Balances sustainability with performance — from eco-cooling systems to solar-powered operations.

💻 Moved from refurbished to new laptops and actually reduced their long-term footprint.

👩‍💻 Supports employee-owners with “10% learning time”, profit-sharing, and a culture of curiosity.

⚙️ Partners with ethical tech suppliers and takes a stand when values matter more than cost.

🌍 Faces challenges with big tech while still striving to make responsible choices.

It’s an inspiring conversation about how IT can help people and the planet without compromising performance or business resilience.

🎧 Listen in for practical insights on:

• Making sustainable IT choices that actually work
• Aligning technology with company values
• Empowering your people through ownership and learning
• Building long-term partnerships based on trust, not just price

Whether you’re a CIO, IT leader, or purpose-driven business owner, this episode will give you ideas on how to make your own IT setup more sustainable and why small decisions can make a big difference.

Listen now and discover how Riverford is redefining what “IT for good” really means.

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Transcript

Julie Bishop (00:00)
I've just had a fantastic conversation with David Eagle. He's at Riverford Organics and he's been telling us all about how they live their values through their IT, not just through the veg boxes.

Julie Bishop (00:11)
Hello and welcome to the next episode of the IT Naturally podcast. And today I'm talking to David Eagle, who's from Riverford Organics. Hello, David.

David Eagle (00:23)
Hi Julie, nice to be here.

Julie Bishop (00:26)
It should be fun finding out a lot more about Riverford and about your journey. I think most of us here know all about Riverford and their organic veg boxes and indeed at IT Naturally we've been buying them I think since the first month that we actually started. We've been using you right through and you've got a reputation as a really pioneering ethical business.

And I'm really pleased to say that I'm learning that the IT team is living those same values

David Eagle (00:56)
Absolutely. Yeah, and very excited to tell you a bit about that today.

Julie Bishop (01:02)
Brilliant, because we think that your outlook and our outlook are really, really similar. let's start talking about sustainable IT. Can you tell us particularly about your eco cooling system? Sounds really interesting.

David Eagle (01:17)
Yes. So, like a lot of companies, we use cloud infrastructure, but we also have a certain amount of on-premise infrastructure that we need to run. And before I joined the company, I think it was in around 2015, ⁓ we needed to build a new data center or server room to house that on-prem infrastructure. And the leadership at that time...

looked at different cooling options and they found a product funnily enough called eco cooling, it does what it says on the tin, which is a water evaporation cooler that uses the same refrigerants for example that you find in conventional air conditioning.

We think that unit consumes about half the energy of a conventional air conditioning unit. ⁓

And full disclosure, we still have conventional air conditioning units as backups for resilience purposes. And we do run those units during the summer months because a couple of years ago now, we had a few hardware components failing inside servers and our infrastructure engineers

a suspicion it may be to do with ⁓ condensation because the cooling unit doesn't dry the air in quite the same way that conventional air conditioning.

that out, we didn't want to test it if you know what mean. So we do for a couple of months in the summer we do run on conventional air conditioning and I think that's a good example of balancing what's right for the business with what's right for the planet and trying to make the best choices.

Julie Bishop (02:56)
Yeah.

I so agree. One of the things that people can look at is you've got to be perfect and then you give up. But actually it's about making all of those changes, isn't it? All those changes you can make and the ones you can't make, well, maybe at another time you can do those.

David Eagle (03:20)
Absolutely.

if I describe our energy strategy a little bit and how tech fits into it, might be interesting. But we've got three prongs, I suppose, to that strategy. The first is that we, ⁓ about 75 % of the electricity we buy, we get ⁓ from renewable sources. The second prong or strand is that we generate about 15 % of the electricity we use by solar. We've invested heavily in that.

Julie Bishop (03:24)
Yeah. Yeah.

David Eagle (03:48)
And the third is that we're trying to reduce energy consumption. So the eco-cooling system in the server room is one example. We also look really closely at energy saving when we're buying new equipment. So we've fairly recently replaced all of the network equipment at our headquarters here in Devon. And we think we've saved about 35,000 kilowatt hours per year by just

thinking carefully about the products we were choosing. They need to have the right functional specifications and they've got to do the job. But looking closely at those energy usage stats as well. And we've been able to make a big impact on our energy usage there.

Julie Bishop (04:25)
Yeah.

It's brilliant.

It's really, it's so good to balance those things correctly, isn't it? And to take energy into account. Now I've been intrigued. You've moved away from refurbished laptops. Tell me more about that. That's really interesting because it goes against what you'd think we'd do.

David Eagle (04:54)
Yeah, there is a bit of a story around this. Historically, Riverford procured a lot of its end user equipment, so laptops, mobile phones, as well as bits

pieces, in a kind of ad hoc way from a variety of different suppliers, and it was all refurbished kit. It wasn't really working, to be honest.

It wasn't working for our end users, our co-owners as we call them within the business because we're an employee owned business. A lot of them were using very old and battered devices which didn't perform well. They were slow. They had to be constantly plugged in because they wouldn't hold a charge. So it wasn't working from a usability perspective. It wasn't working for our support team who were constantly having to cannibalize parts from old laptops to keep things running or, you know,

Julie Bishop (05:34)
Thanks.

David Eagle (05:51)
never had spares to hand out if there was a new starter within the business or someone's laptop failed completely. They had a real problem. And it wasn't working for our finance team either because some months we didn't buy anything. Other months we were turning up with an unplanned capex approval and asking for money to buy a bunch of laptops. So on a number of levels, it wasn't really working for us. When I came in and we analyzed it,

looked at closely, we decided pretty quickly that actually on those three levels, the usability, the support and the financials, we could get a better solution by buying new. And we also discovered that there wasn't a lot of

was pretty close in terms of sustainability as well. ⁓ It's not really rocket science. The trick is just that instead of

Julie Bishop (06:42)
Yeah.

David Eagle (06:47)
a laptop that's been refurbished after say three years in a big corporate setting.

We're buying them new and we're running them for five to six years. We might have to do a bit we might have to do bit of preventative maintenance or maybe install some extra memory in those devices just to keep them going for those last few years. But it cuts out that overhead of refurbishing and the kind of the carbon, you like, of sending it back to a refurbishment center.

Julie Bishop (06:57)
Okay. Yeah.

David Eagle (07:14)
and then out to us as a customer again. So yeah, we've rolled that out. We've got a much

planned replacement lifecycle now for all of our devices. So finance are happy. They know when the money is going to be needed. Our end users are happy because they've got good working laptops now. And our support team aren't having to find bits

borrow bits and all the rest of it, particularly the fleet running.

Julie Bishop (07:41)
And all

of the IT security having standards is so much more important than it was four or five years ago. It's a very different landscape, isn't it?

David Eagle (07:49)
Yeah, absolutely.

Completely. we had an absolute kind of hodgepodge of different devices and models and all the rest of it. We've been able to standardise and make things much better, much easier to manage.

Julie Bishop (08:02)
And we work with a, I'm sure you do as well, we work with a partner called ICEX you probably work with another one, who take any of our devices, and then they're reused by schools and people who need a lot less powerful devices, but don't have access to devices otherwise. So they don't recycle, as in they don't take them to bits.

they get them working and they send them out or they use them. We've done some work with them on getting them to work as cloud books so that none of the devices are thrown away,

David Eagle (08:34)
Yeah, we're just setting up actually with an organisation called the Turing Trust. So this

part of Alan Turing's legacy and they do exactly that. We've done quite a lot of due diligence on, you we didn't want to find that Riverford laptops were ending up in landfill in Africa or something like that. So we've been quite careful and tried to make sure that it's all legit, which it is and it sounds really promising. So we're excited about that partnership.

Julie Bishop (09:03)
And if we move on to the people, because that's such a large part of the B Corp for you and for us, what do you do at Riverford for your people and how does that affect what you do in IT? ⁓

David Eagle (09:16)
Yes, a good question. as I mentioned earlier, Riverford is an employee owned business. It's a like the John Lewis kind of where the ownership of the business is held in trust. When you start working here, you become a co-owner, as we call it, but you can't take those shares with you when you leave. It stays in situ to protect the business for future generations, I guess.

We work quite hard on looking after our co-owners because we all own the business and we all have a say, although the kind of hierarchy in the organisational structure is fairly conventional. We do an annual best companies survey and that isn't just

getting a statement.

the recruitment page of our website to try and attract talent. We really take it quite seriously. We look at the results and all of the comments and we build departmental plans on areas we need to address. We just got our results back and I'm delighted to say that the IT got a three-star rating which is the highest rating for the second year in a row and I think that's because people realise that we do act on the results and we

We take it seriously, as I said.

In tech, we don't do this across the board in Refinery, but in tech, we have something called 10 % time, all of our team members are encouraged to take 10 % of their working week to study and keep up to date with new tech and to explore areas that they're particularly interested

Julie Bishop (10:55)
We do three hours of training time, so it's very similar.

David Eagle (10:57)
Okay,

very similar, yeah. And we run a monthly tech showcase as well, like a show and tell where everyone brings interesting stuff they've been doing in the last month or so. Just trying to think of other kind of benefits of being an employee owned business. So we have something called Profit Share. So at the end of every year, 20 % of the profit we make is a business.

is shared equally between all of our employees. So the CEO gets the same share as someone at the bottom of the salary ladder. And I really love that. I think that's some really fantastic thing. It's also, or at least a portion of it is tax free because of our status as an employee owned business. And I know that our co-owners really look forward to that announcement in June because it's not only is it a nice kind of

Julie Bishop (11:46)
Okay.

David Eagle (11:53)
extra bit of money in your paycheck but it's a real shared celebration of our success from last year. Oh the lights have just gone off in the room, me.

Julie Bishop (12:01)
Energy saving.

Ours actually we announce in October and October or November and gets ours comes through in the December paycheck pay time which

people do appreciate a bit of a bonus in

was going to move on to something quite different, David,

suppliers and sustainability has been a massive challenge for us at IT Naturally. There are some areas where it can be really difficult to influence the suppliers that you have and to understand that you're you're getting

suppliers who share your values. So how do you balance cost and service and then the values when you're selecting IT suppliers or any other suppliers?

David Eagle (12:56)
Yes, I'll talk a little bit more generally first and then I'll focus on the IT side of it if that's okay.

Julie Bishop (13:00)
Thank you.

David Eagle (13:02)
of the things because we're a farming business, we have origins in farming. One of the things we do is we try to take really good care of our growers as we call them, the farmers that supply River ford because we don't grow everything we sell to our customers. And what we don't want to do is treat them in the way that, for example, some of the supermarkets treat their supply chain.

We try to offer them a fair price, guarantee that we'll buy everything we say we're going to buy from them and just look after them in other ways too. We want to

partnerships with our suppliers generally, but we accept as well that there are some kind of commodity type things where actually to be a viable business, we just need to make sure we're getting the best price. So if I'm buying...

mobile phones for example, I'm probably just going to go for, we know the device we want, we're going to go for the best deal. If there is a supplier that is particularly horrific from a kind of values point of view, we may avoid them but ultimately we're looking at kind of price and service. There are other things we buy in tech and you know we've been talking about relationship with IT Naturally, where we can look a bit more

the kind of value side and the partnership side than we do necessarily just at price. ⁓ And it's really nice to me to be able to not, I won't say pick and choose, but to factor that in when we're making decisions. ⁓ It's not just a bottom line decision, there are other things. And actually there's an example

where we have our Microsoft licensing with a very large corporate ⁓

And we moved away from them last year for the renewal because we just didn't feel that it was a great fit or that they were necessarily working with us in that sort of partnership way that we wanted. ⁓ So we took a bit of a price hit on that to be with a partner that we liked more.

Julie Bishop (15:10)
it's difficult, isn't it? Because it's, as you say, you there are times I think, particularly with services, particularly with people, you don't want to buy at the lowest price necessarily, because you want the people that are working on your behalf to be paid a living wage, you don't, you don't want to

buy when you know that the people that are selling to you are being exploited. ⁓ But it's very difficult to understand and to know.

David Eagle (15:37)
Absolutely.

Yeah, Riverford's a real living wage employer ⁓ and we've worked hard to make sure that we meet that commitment. And there is certainly a sense that if we just outsource stuff to

Julie Bishop (15:43)
Yeah, we're the same as you on that one. Yeah.

David Eagle (15:58)
someone who isn't upholding the same standards as us, we're no better than anyone else. We're just pushing the problem onto someone else. ⁓ So yeah, it's certainly something we try to consider.

Julie Bishop (16:05)
Exactly.

So what challenges do you face with the large tech providers? And I'm thinking the of the Microsoft, the AWS, those Cisco's, all of those kind of guys, what challenges do you face when you're working with them and their environmental and sometimes political track records?

David Eagle (16:32)
Yeah, absolutely. It's, mean, for an organisation like us, it's quite difficult to really understand all that to a level where you feel completely confident that you've got a good handle on it.

We certainly talk about it. We get a certain amount of challenge from our co-owner council, so our employee council, and they've recently been asking us, for example, about the energy usage of the

providers like ChatGPT. A major problem indeed. I think for what it's worth, my personal view is Microsoft, think, possibly the best of them.

Julie Bishop (17:02)
Yeah, yeah. It's a major problem that.

David Eagle (17:15)
I'm not even sure if bad bunches is fair. I think they all recognise that these things are important.

Julie Bishop (17:20)
They appear the most responsible

when I've researched Microsoft feel the most responsible.

David Eagle (17:26)
Yes, I think so. think they've got, for example, a commitment. I don't know where they are with it, but this year to actually to deliver in their data centres 100 % renewable energy.

Julie Bishop (17:38)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and they're pushing on that they, they achieved it in France a long time ago, I think, didn't they, and then they're gradually spreading out, but, and their carbon neutral, right, they paid back the carbon right from when they were founded. Yeah, they did that quite, quite a while ago. So they they're not just they don't just pay today's carbon, they paid back from from the day they were founded, which we

David Eagle (17:55)
Okay, I realise that.

Yeah.

Julie Bishop (18:05)
we've done but we were only founded five years ago so it wasn't there and we don't we probably don't owe as much on carbon as Microsoft do.

David Eagle (18:08)
What?

No, that's it. And realistically for desktop productivity, if you're not using Microsoft, you're probably using Google. How much difference there is between them, I'm not really sure.

Julie Bishop (18:20)
Yeah. ⁓

talked a bit about your employee ownership, your co-ownership. How does that influence your decisions? How does the board work? How does that change your decisions?

David Eagle (18:40)
Yeah, good question. as I mentioned, kind of organisational structure is fairly ⁓ traditional. ⁓ We

a handful of exec directors, then the senior leadership team beneath them and then it works down in hierarchies. ⁓ Day to day business decisions are made within that structure, as you would expect, and we have ⁓ fairly standard.

⁓ approval processes for spend or new roles or whatever.

When we're working on projects that involve any amount really of business change or impact on our employees, ⁓ we work really hard on the comms. ⁓ The co-owner council very often will get ⁓ early sight of projects and initiatives that happening that if they have any significant impact.

They will provide feedback and I can say that the exec team really listen to that feedback and so did the senior managers and so on.

And it works really well, actually, think it's a nice kind

governance structure, Holy Trinity, you like, of exec board, covenant council, actually it's force, I don't know what that would be, because there's the trust as well. But they kind of keep each other in check nicely. That doesn't seem to be too

of friction actually. I think they're all very focused on the same things and driving the business forward in the right way. ⁓ But that kind of council and the trust really do keep us anchored in our values, you can probably see behind me.

Julie Bishop (20:11)
Okay.

sound so enthusiastic. It's lovely. Lovely to hear. you what do you enjoy most about working at Riverford and leading their IT?

David Eagle (20:35)
I, the thing I've always loved about working in tech is those moments when you deliver something that makes real change to the organisation. So it might be a new business capability or a new customer feature or a significant efficiency improvement. I've always really enjoyed those, those parts. I get to do that at Riverford, but I, it's also in the setting that an organisation that really aligns with my personal values. And I find that.

really satisfying and really motivating, working for the kind of benefit, I don't want to sound too worthy, but working for the benefit of my employees, my coloners, and part of our mission is to try and protect the planet as well. I think that's really powerful for me.

Julie Bishop (21:25)
Brilliant, thank you, thank you. I've heard you've got a very good, unusual IT story. I always like to end with one of these and I've heard this is a very good one, so.

David Eagle (21:36)
I mean, if I think the really funny and kind of quirky stories, there are more of them from earlier in my career. I think the world is becoming a slightly less ⁓ less quirky and amusing place. Sometimes we're all getting a bit serious. certainly when I first started working with an American company, I remember about 20 years ago or something like that.

And it was actually buying, or putting in a business case for some new servers. it included, as I've always done since, I still do now, it included some sort of information on carbon and energy usage. The

CFO at the time found this very amusing and started telling me all about his gas guzzling pickup truck.

and basically said that in one journey he probably gets to be more carbon than I was saving with my new service. So that was both amusing but also slightly terrifying that sort of opinion existed.

Julie Bishop (22:44)
Yeah,

I think we've still got to do what we can do and influence where we can influence and yeah there'll always be some people that don't want to.

want to support that and they're quite naive about it aren't they? think less, I think there are less and less, the younger generation are generally far more aware aren't they? So hopefully as they become more more powerful and we become older and older they'll improve the way that we work.

David Eagle (23:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Julie Bishop (23:19)
David, it's been really enjoyable talking to you. Thank you so much for joining us on the IT Naturally

Thank you.

David Eagle (23:27)
My pleasure Julie, thanks very much.