Walmart

FAIRR Commentary

• ‘Walmart states that climate change is a key focus and that it is working with farmers to improve production efficiencies. However, FAIRR has found no evidence to demonstrate that the company recognises the need to transition diets and its product portfolio in line with a 1.5-degree world, despite being the world’s largest retailer.
• The company is focussed on enhancing the sustainable sourcing of 20 key commodities by 2025, including meat, dairy and seafood, and works closely with the Sustainability Consortium to understand supplier-level sustainability data which informs buying teams’ assessment of suppliers’ sustainability.
• The company launched Project Gigaton in 2017 which is its flagship Scope 3 emissions reduction project, aiming to avoid 1 billion metric tonnes of GHG emissions from its global value chain by 2030.
• In the past 12 months, Walmart has expanded its range of plant-based product offerings in the US primarily through external brands only including JUST Egg, Gardein, Tofurky, No Evil Foods and Loma Linda. Its UK subsidiary Asda launched a plant-based range with 48 products in January 2020. However, Asda’s total contribution to Walmart revenue is 6% total, making this a marginal contribution to the Group’s overall plant-based product expansion.
• Overall, Walmart does not yet recognise the climate mitigation opportunities associated with diversified protein sources. We found limited innovation within its private label, and it has no plans to educate or engage consumers on the need to transition to healthier and more sustainable diets.
• We encourage the company to expand its sustainability ambitions and work towards Board-endorsed recognition and action on the need to need to transition to sustainable diets, including explicit focus on animal agriculture as a key contributor to environmental impacts of current agricultural systems.

Company Comment

Thank you for reaching out about sustainable protein chains and for seeking to understand how companies are addressing ESG issues and achieving climate targets. I appreciate your efforts to support people having access to adequate, sustainable and nutritious food.

As the world’s largest grocer, we support continued development of a safer, more affordable, accessible, healthier and sustainable food system. One way we’re doing that is through our commitment to more sustainably source 20 key commodities by 2025; meat and dairy are among our priority commodities. We are also taking action on climate change through greenhouse gas reductions. For example, as part of our science-based target, we are working with suppliers to reduce 1 gigaton of emissions in our supply chain by 2030 – including efforts on sustainable animal agriculture. Further information can be found here.

Our business seeks to continuously meet customer choice demands. Walmart US and Sam’s Club US offer an array of plant-based proteins in multiple categories across the store, in the fresh meat, frozen meat, dairy, eggs and chilled breakfast commodities, and health and wellness supplements departments. In fresh meat, for example, our merchants are working to sell more plant-based proteins and offer more options to customers in more stores across the country and placing the items right alongside the fresh animal-protein. This strategy is also used in the other categories with plant-based and animal protein items to standardize the case and clearly present the various protein options to the customer, whether it’s beef, poultry, pork or plant-based.

While we are not aligned with the entirety of FAIRR’s methodology or assessment of Walmart’s ESG material issues, we welcome the dialogue and look forward to continuing it. We will alert you to the release of our 2020 ESG Report in the coming months.