Message from our Sustainability Leadership
Message from our Sustainability Leadership
It’s often been said that sustainability is a journey, not a destination. Sobeys has been on the sustainability journey for many years, including our efforts to demonstrate leadership in energy conservation and recycling. This, our first, sustainability review focuses primarily on our direct operations and those environmental initiatives that have been undertaken, up to and including 2009.
Our sustainability initiatives are prudently informed by broad stakeholder engagement, not in reaction to any specific stakeholder group. Decisions are made on evidence-based scientific data and consensus. Actions on important social and environmental issues are necessarily forward looking, and we accept the need for our company and our industry to show leadership on key issues, even in advance of broad customer demand.
The cumulative environmental and social impact of bringing products to our shelves tends to be 80% to 90% from the supply chain, with the rest attributable to our operations. With such a globalized food supply chain, the environmental and social challenges are not unique to Sobeys – and the solutions will not be unique either. Sobeys is actively providing leadership and participating in numerous Canadian, U.S. and international industry organizations to help define and adopt sustainable supply chain initiatives. We are also reviewing our supply chain and engaging with our suppliers to determine reasonable and appropriate courses of action.
Sobeys’ sustainability initiatives also reflect our decentralized business structure and management philosophy. Just as our regional business units are run with high levels of autonomy in order to maintain local market adaptation, innovation, entrepreneurship and accountability, many of our environmental initiatives have been, and will continue to be, driven by our regional business units.
This report provides snapshots of the individual initiatives we are taking across Sobeys Inc. as well as information about important emerging industry actions. We look forward to communicating further plans of action in our next review.
David Smith
Vice President
Retail Strategy and Sustainability
