Sustainability in the grocery sector: Woolies vs. Coles vs. Metcash
How do Australia’s supermarket retailers stack up on the sustainability shelf?
Let’s take a look at the Australian Supermarket giants. How do the big players stack up when it comes to sustainability?
Coles overtakes Woolies to become the highest SDG scorer of listed supermarket giants.
During lockdown, a trip to the supermarket was about as exciting an outing as many of us got. You might have enjoyed some socially distanced perusing of empty pasta and toilet paper aisles. Perhaps you lingered in the bakery section, breathing in the scent of freshly baked bread (through your mask of course). All to escape the familiar four walls of your living room.
You see, despite the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in these retailers remaining high during the pandemic, millions of consumers still continue to shop in-store. This is a true demonstration of our reliance on the retail giants.
Given that it’s been over a year since we first shone the sustainability spotlight on the Australian supermarket giants, we thought it was about time we did a reboot. One year on, how do the big players stack up when it comes to sustainability? How have they changed?
With unlisted ALDI not able to be part of our analysis, we looked at the sustainability results of Coles, Woolworths and MetCash. While two are household names, MetCash is better known for it’s IGA, Foodland, Cellarbrations and The Bottle-O brands to name a few.
Notably only two of the three supermarket retailers scored above the Sustainable Platform database (over 21,000+ companies) average score of 50.
The best performer in terms of sustainability contribution is Coles, with a score of 62 (up from 55 in 2020). They overtook Woolies with their score of 52 (down from 56 last year).
Finally, MetCash scored 24, which while much lower than the database average SDG score of 50, is considerably higher than their score in 2020 of 5
All three supermarkets have controversial industry exposure to alcohol sales. Metcash’s revenue contribution from alcohol is the largest of the three at 31%. This is one of the reasons why it doesn’t score higher for sustainability overall. Other controversial industry detected for all companies was tobacco and of course fossil fuels. The analysis also detected Woolies’ exposure to gambling, an exposure that will no longer remain now that the demerger with Endeavour Group Ltd has been implemented.
*All SDG score and data are provided by Sustainable Platform based on data as at 26 October 2021.
Top contributing goals
The 3 companies analyzed contributed mostly to two of the SDG goals via the provision of food needs. The highest SDG contribution is to SDG2: Zero Hunger. The second highest SDG contribution is to SDG1: No Poverty.
SDG 1: No Poverty
SDG 2: Zero Hunger
Find out more about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
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