Nos engagements
Nos engagements pour permettre à nos clients de vivre mieux et proposer une alimentation de confiance pour les habitants dans tous nos pays
Engaging for the planet
Enabling everyone to enjoy better lives thanks to a preserved planet is one of the pillars of Vision 2032 “Eating well, living better while preserving the planet”.
FAt Auchan Retail, we believe that what is good for our health and our enjoyment also needs to be good for the planet. When it comes to living better, all the while preserving the biodiversity of our forests, oceans and soils, every bit counts.
So, for many years already, we have been in action to make quality and taste available at the best price, with respect for the environment.
And we want to go even further.
With the contribution of our employees, our partners and all of the general public, we are resolutely determined to do ever more in removing carbon from our value chain. Working together, we will also find the power to take action to combat plastic pollution, achieve zero food waste and protect biodiversity.
Decarbonising our value chain
To make our contribution to the fight against global warming, we are working to limit our ecological footprint and decarbonise our operational chain, from product production to in-store sales. This will entail a profound transformation of our business model to make it more resilient, an acceleration in our energy autonomy and restraint, and partnerships with our suppliers so that, together, we can build an offer that is as free of carbon as possible.
Consequently, in our refrigeration systems we are gradually replacing the refrigerants that are most harmful to the climate with more environmentally-friendly solutions. We are deploying tools to measure and steer our greenhouse gas emissions. We are reworking our offer to give preference to local sourcing and cut down on transport between production sites and shops.
Preserving biodiversity
To live better lives, we also need to think about the health of our planet and the biodiversity on it. At Auchan Retail, we believe that our business cannot be meaningful unless we take care of our impact on the living ecosystems that surround and sustain us. It is thus important for us to reduce the footprint of our activities (offers and shops) on biodiversity, with a particular focus on the forest, marine and soil ecosystems.
This will require a commitment to contributing to the regeneration of nature and the land, paying close attention to the protection of fish stocks and integrating the issues of risk and dependence on ecosystem services into our business model.
Putting an end to food waste
In an increasingly populous world, where urbanisation is reducing farmland, where food needs are steadily increasing, and where around one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost (source: FAO), we believe it is our responsibility as a distributor to help consumers reduce their household food waste, in the same way as we do in our own aisles and with our other stakeholders. We therefore want to take positive steps towards protecting natural resources, biodiversity and the climate. Likewise, we offer help to those experiencing food insecurity through partnerships with non-profit associations and food banks. And our employees exercise their creative skills to transform food products that are still good to eat and offer them in new forms. All driven by the same goal: putting an end to food waste.
Fighting plastic pollution
Plastics combine multiple advantages: they are economical, light, strong, easy to produce, easy to clean, adaptable to a wide range of uses and guarantee food safety for perishable products. As a result, it can be found throughout our daily lives. However, the linear model, still too widely used -- “extract - manufacture - throw out” -- is devastating for the environment. Plastic is now made primarily from oil, a finite resource that requires increasingly polluting extraction processes to keep up with demand. And the volumes produced are exploding: since 1964, global plastic production has grown by a factor of twenty, reaching 311 million tonnes in 2014, and is set to almost quadruple by 2050.
To turn this trend around, Auchan Retail signed the European Plastics Pact in 2020. The Pact has enabled significant progress to be made. Recyclable packaging already accounts for ⅔ of packaging in our European countries and the total weight of plastic in packaging used in food and beverage outlets was cut by 1,422 tonnes between 2021 and 2022. In the summer of 2023, after the European Plastics Pact Steering Committee decided to wind down its activities, Auchan Retail joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation network, showing its determination to carry its action forward and achieve its objectives: to ultimately offer 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable product packaging for its Auchan products and to eliminate plastic packaging as far as possible from self-service food and fruit and vegetable departments.
Committing in favour of the planet also means learning to produce and consume differently
The only way to guarantee the long-term availability of the natural resources essential to our activities is to preserve them. It is for this reason that we are committed to developing virtuous production methods that limit their use. Reduction starts with preventing waste! This applies both to the foodstuffs we sell and to the production of all our branded products. We are fighting against over-packaging by rethinking our packaging, making greater use of recycled and/or recyclable raw materials, and thinking in terms of product repairability, as well as functional solutions based on the appropriate use of goods and services in proportion to the needs expressed by our customers.
In this manner, we are stimulating the innovation of the Auchan Retail teams to propose a value-creating offer that is committed to the planet. We are speeding up the development of the circular economy in our products and shops (eco-design, Second Hand, etc.). We are promoting more climate-friendly consumer habits (flexitarian diet, elimination of ingredients such as palm oil from some of our products, etc.).
Inevitably, the production of waste by our shops and logistics warehouses is being subject to ever more thorough sorting, so that it can be recycled via dedicated sourcing channels or, on site, via short distribution channels that limit the environmental impact of transport.
