SEAFOODNEWS.COM by John Sackton — February 27, 2015 — Walmart has been an influential leader in setting how food retailers educate their consumers and manage their supply chains to support sustainable purchasing. Their statements and actions regarding seafood have evolved over time.
The latest program is called ‘Sustainability Leaders’, and is an attempt to mark consumer packages with a Walmart sustainability logo.
Called Sustainability Leaders shop, the portal on Walmart.com builds on the company’s ambition to provide customers more information about products that are affordable and produced in an environmentally and socially responsible way.
Neil Ashe, president and CEO of Walmart Global eCommerce, said, “Our customers can trust us to work with suppliers who have an ongoing commitment to both sustainability and affordability.”
The aim is to give customers who want to use sustainability criteria in their purchasing a vehicle to do so.
“We created Sustainability Leaders to help customers live better. The price for a Sustainability Leaders’ product doesn’t go up when a supplier is badged. It’s the same price today as it was yesterday, ” said Walmart’s statement.
“Since 2007, we have aspired to three broad sustainability goals, one of which is selling products that sustain people and the environment. Empowering our customers to work with us to reward best-in-class companies by purchasing their products is a key next step in achieving this goal. ”
“We’ve heard from our customers that the main barriers in acting on sustainability are: 1) knowing what sustainability actually means; and 2) understanding which companies are doing better than others. ”
To address this issue, Walmart says they will now turn to the sustainability index, created by TSC (The Sustainability Consortium), which grades products across categories. Those products and suppliers which score 80% or higher on the TSC indexes – which are specific to the food and type of product – will be able to display the badge.
This marks a further evolution in Walmart’s taking ownership of how they communicate and purchase sustainable seafood.
In 2006, the company had a huge impact on the US retail sector, when they announced plans to purchase “all of its wild-caught fresh and frozen fish for the United States market from Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) -certified fisheries within the next three to five years. “
In 2009, Walmart first established the sustainability index, and began to organize the Sustainability Consortium. The business issue was that they did not want to confuse customers with a plethora of sustainability marks and standards across a range of products. Why should the customer who cares about sustainability have to navigate one system at the seafood counter, a second system in cosmetics, and a third system in paper products.
In 2011, they updated their seafood purchasing policy to say “In our ongoing effort to promote worldwide seafood sustainability, Walmart U. S. and Sam’s Club U. S. require all fresh and frozen, farmed and wild seafood products we sell to become third-party certified as sustainable using Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP), or equivalent standards."
"As our overall goal is to increase the availability of sustainable seafood, we will require currently uncertified fisheries and aquaculture suppliers to develop work plans to achieve certification and report progress biannually. ”
The key change here was first, to accept equivalent standards of seafood sustainability to the Marine Stewardship Council and GAA’s Best Aquaculture Practices, and secondly to recognize improvement programs as acceptable interim strategies for fisheries that were not presently certified.
Today, a new seafood sustainability policy is on their website. It reads (emphasis in the original) :
Walmart U. S. and Sam’s Club require all fresh and frozen, farmed and wild seafood suppliers to source from fisheries who are:
Third-party certified as sustainable using Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP)
OR
Managing a program in accordance with the Principles of Credible Sustainability Programs developed by The Sustainability Consortium. (Third party review must be commissioned and provided upon request)
OR
Actively working toward certification or involved in a Fisheries Improvement Project (FIP) or an Aquaculture Improvement Project (AIP).
The new Sustainability Leaders Program will badge products that meet these guidelines.
This puts to rest any remaining issues Walmart had with Alaska salmon, which flared up two years ago when most of the Alaskan producers withdrew from the MSC program. The salmon fishery is certified by the RFM program to FAO responsible fishing and ecolabeling guidelines, and the RFM program is in the process of revising its governance and structure to meet current international certification standards of the TSC. Last year Walmart accepted Alaska's RFM salmon certification as meeting the TSC sustainability principles.
As a result, all Alaskan salmon is now qualified to be badged as sustainable under Walmart’s sustainability leaders program.
Although the program has started as an online effort, Rob Kaplan, Director of Sustainability at Walmart, said that if it were successful the company would consider rolling it out in the brick and mortar stores. “We have a history of rolling out new campaigns online first,” he explained, citing the retailers Made in USA indicator in an interview with Triple Pundit.
This evolution in sustainability communication is likely to be followed by other retailers – who all face the same issue of how to communicate sustainability to their customers across a wide range of products.
This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It has been reprinted with permission.