Supermarkets can’t govern themselves on climate and health – Inside track

This post is by Jessica Sinclair Taylor, deputy director of Feedback.

A new report by Feedback, supported by The Food Foundation, tots up 600 climate, land use and healthy diets commitments made by the top ten UK food retailers between 2014 and 2024. We wanted to assess the retail industry against the greatest risk of a voluntary, industry led approach to any social or environmental challenge: that it gives the impression of progress without delivering, undermining the case for government to step in.

On the one hand, 600 commitments sounds impressive. That’s an average of six a day over the time period. Clearly, this attests to a large body of work by supermarkets on sustainability issues, both alone and as part of pre-competitive agreements co-ordinated by charities such as WRAP and WWF.

Voluntary targets are impossible to track properly
The big question is whether all this target setting has delivered results, and here’s where the answers get complicated. For example, of 57 individual commitments on healthy and sustainable diets, only just over half include measurable targets. That means it’s impossible to track, overall, whether they are on course to deliver what they promise.

Second, retailers take different approaches to target setting. To contrast two very different approaches, Co-op set over 100 targets in the period, because they update targets as soon as old ones are reached, whereas Iceland has set only 15.

Amid this uneven and complicated landscape, it’s very difficult to compare retailers on progress, or to assess the overall delivery of the sector on key issues, for example on decarbonisation. Despite making climate pledges and setting net zero goals, many supermarkets have yet to publish concrete, costed action plans to deliver them. For example, on scope three emissions (the ones arising in their supply chains), while nine out of ten retailers we assessed have set reduction targets for 2030, with six years to go before this deadline, only four were publishing UK progress updates, of which only three (Waitrose, Co-op and Morrisons) showed progress in the right direction.

Industry insiders privately describe their boards signing off on climate ‘plans’ which are little more than graphs with a downward trend, not costed, realistic plans for what needs to change within the business to deliver.

The food sector is way behind others on climate action
This is serious: not meeting scope three emissions targets means supermarkets are failing to deliver overall decarbonisation in line with national climate targets. The Food Foundation found earlier this year that, while the economy as a whole has reduced carbon emissions by 38 per cent between 2008 and 2022, emissions from the food system fell by just 17 per cent over the same period.

The food sector accounts for over a third of the UK’s territorial greenhouse gas emissions, with agriculture and land use change – particularly deforestation – being major contributors. The Climate Change Committee has already highlighted that agriculture and land are behind other sectors and need ‘substantial acceleration’ to achieve net zero carbon emissions, and they have “lack of policies” to get there.

The simple problem facing supermarkets in meeting their climate goals is that they need to reduce sales of meat and dairy products, which account for around half of their overall emissions, and increase sales of whole foods and plant-based protein. They have known this for years, and it has proven a hard pill to swallow, yet it needn’t be. Support from policy makers has the potential to increase food security, give people much better access to healthy, plant-rich diets and support the livelihood of farmers, as Green Alliance, The Food Foundation and the Good Food Institute recently argued.

To do that, the government needs to proactively govern the food system, to effectively decarbonise our economy, improve health and wellbeing, make better use of land, and preserve nature. The food strategy is the major opportunity to do this. The government has invited many major food businesses to the table (including those, like Cranswick, with dubious track records on environmental issues).

Our report shows that, at a minimum, the strategy should require all major food businesses to disclose data on key sustainability and health metrics, uniformly and regularly. It should also set measurable targets to promote healthy and sustainable diets and meet climate goals.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the industry over the past ten years has not been a lack of good faith in setting targets, but a failure to admit that they can’t meet them alone. Government support – both carrots and sticks – is needed.