Sustain takes a keen interest in supermarket policies and activities on health and sustainability. These pages record recent activity on this issue. For enquiries about this material, contact Sustain's policy director Kath Dalmeny on kath@sustainweb.org.
Winter 2008
The National Consumer Council's latest ‘rating retailers’ report was published in August, for which Sustain coordinated the research team and data analysis. This work highlighted that health may be the victim of the ‘credit crunch’. It remains to be seen to what extent the new Consumer Focus body will pursue food issues.
In December, Sustain's policy director Kath Dalmeny participated in a "stakeholder consultation" event convened by Tesco's corporate social responsibility (CSR) team, which was also attended by two Sustain members. Tesco's intention was for the meeting to focus on the supermarket's new CSR report - its format, scope and style - but Sustain pointed out that CSR reporting is only as good as the content that it represents, and the practical steps taken to improve performance on health, ethics and sustainability. Sustain pointed out several areas in which it felt Tesco was lagging, not least treatment of suppliers, environmental standards, fish sustainability standards, and opposition to front-of-pack traffic light nutrition labelling.
Summer 2008
Sustain policy director Kath Dalmeny has been helping the National Consumer Council to finalise its fourth Rating Retailers for Health survey, due for publication in September.Spring 2008
Rating retailers for healthThanks to Kath’s usual high-quality work over several years for the National Consumer Council (NCC) on this series of reports, Sustain has once again been funded to manage the ‘Rating Retailers for Health’ project (now in its fourth phase), which measures and compares supermarkets on major health issues, including price promotions, nutritional content of own-brand foods, nutritional labelling and customer advice. Sustain project officer Ida Fabrizio has overseen the survey process and Kath is managing the data collection and report writing. Four stalwart surveyors travelled to eight large Sheffield supermarkets during March, where they found the price war raging. Over 1,000 price promotions were found in each of several supermarkets – unsurprisingly, most of them for the least healthy foods. After sifting through and checking the avalanche of data, Kath is currently preparing a report for the NCC, which will be published later in the year.
Ethical Hijack
Sustain continues to work with a number of organisations to maintain the pressure on the Food Standards Agency and other regulatory bodies to tackle the misuse of sustainability terms in food marketing – specifically ‘seasonal’, ‘local’ and ‘farmers’ market’, of which many examples have been found in leading UK supermarkets. These were used to illustrate the new Sustain report Ethical Hijack.
Airfreight of food
Kath participated in a seminar and consultation with the Food Ethics Council, on what key messages civil society should send to supermarkets about tackling airfreight of food. Further information about airfreight of food is available in our climate change pages.
Policy seminar
Kath also worked with Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network and Stephen Reeson of the Food and Drink Federation to plan an industry seminar on what policies are now needed to achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions in the food sector. All of the leading supermarkets were represented at the seminar, which was hosted at the Sustainable Development Commission in January, and chaired by Forum for the Future. Senior industry representatives present emphasised the need for financial and other incentives to encourage change, and for stronger leadership from government.
Winter 2007-08
Green, healthy and fairThe Sustainable Development Commission's assessment of the supermarket sector was published in February, setting out a new agenda for supermarkets to meet sustainability goals. Several Sustain staff members and trustees advised on this project.
Shop local first
In November, Sustain's policy director Kath Dalmeny chaired a lively Friends of the Earth ‘Shop Local First’ conference. This was attended by representatives of the independent retail sector, local environmental campaigners, local authorities and others. Sustain's Eat Somerset project officer Alison Belshaw also ran a workshop to discuss how local shops can be encouraged to use more locally produced food.
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