Our approach
Corporate Responsibility & Sainsbury's
For Sainsbury's, corporate responsibility is about providing our customers with the widest choice of quality food, at fair prices. It is also about paying our suppliers a fair price and giving them the reassurance of knowing that they have a buyer for their products on reasonable terms; enriching our communities through employment and career development opportunities; growing our business profitably for our shareholders; making the most effective use of our valuable resources like water and electricity; and respecting the local environment.
Strategy
As a leading supermarket retailer, we face a wide range of issues and challenges. Many of these are complex, interrelated, and increasingly global in nature. Some of them we can directly control, others we can influence, but some, unfortunately, are beyond our reach. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions to balance conflicting priorities.
We believe that by considering the wider social, environmental, and economic impacts of our business we will deliver long-term shareholder value. This is because we will be better able to meet all our stakeholders' expectations. Our five values have guided our company for over 140 years, and provide the practical framework for doing this. They guide us in everything we do – from key business decisions to day-to-day activities.
Materiality
When we set our goals and priorities we are guided by a ‘materiality’ process. This helps us to focus on where our greatest impacts are, or that substantively influence stakeholders and where our efforts can make the most difference.
This process of focusing on the most material issues and opportunities helps us to make a more direct link between the sustainability challenges we face along with our commercial strategy.
1 Analyse
We analysed a wide range of information to understand the key issues for different stakeholder groups. The information included our engagement with stakeholders, research and surveys of stakeholder opinion.
2 Prioritise
We then mapped these issues according to the level of stakeholder concern and potential to impact our business.
3 Act
The outputs of this process have been used to inform our CR strategy, set new commitments and select the topics covered in this report. We also use the materiality process to inform our ongoing stakeholder engagement.
Stakeholder engagement
As a leading national supermarket with a global supply chain, we have significant scale and influence. This means we also have a role to play in tackling issues and finding solutions. We know we cannot always do this on our own. We therefore work in partnership with key stakeholders, including Government, NGOs and academics, as well as our customers and colleagues.
We engage with our shoppers on a daily basis, from customer service feedback to more formal customer surveys, two of which have been carried out in the last 12 months, focusing specifically on corporate responsibility. We talk with our colleagues as well, whether through daily meetings on the shop floor, or ‘Talkback’, our annual survey. We also engage with NGOs and Government agencies on a wide range of specific issues.
We are members of a number of groups, including Business in the Community, the Ethical Trading Initiative, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the World Wildlife Fund Forest and Trade Network. Membership of groups like these helps inform our thinking and allows us to exchange views with stakeholders on areas of common interest.
Justin King, our CEO, and Anna Ford, the chair of our Corporate Responsibility Committee and Non-Executive Director, conduct five formal stakeholder meetings every year. One of these is dedicated to each of our five values and we use them to test whether we are pursuing the right strategy on certain issues and ask for advice if we are not.
Developing and maintaining relationships like this helps us to gain a deeper understanding of complex issues, develop our business and manage our risks better. There will be times when we will take a different view from other external groups and we would never change our policies unless we believed that would help us serve our customers better. But we will always listen.
Commitments & targets
We are setting bold targets to drive real change on the most important issues facing our business. Our current commitments cover specific issues relating to each of our five values. They have been developed by reviewing our previous targets and activities, as well as the outputs of our materiality process and ongoing customer research.
These commitments are not the only things we are focused on. We also continue to implement improvements across a much broader range of issues that, for us, constitute ‘business as usual’. These wider-ranging improvements are detailed throughout this report under the ‘Next Steps’ headings.
Governance
Our values are part of the way we do business at Sainsbury’s. This is reflected in our corporate responsibility governance structure, as shown below. As you can see, members of our Operating Board have responsibility for each of our five values and they also sit on our Corporate Responsibility Steering Group:
