2Sustain

Safeway Inc. is now the first U.S.-based retail grocery chain and manufacturer of private label merchandise to join The Sustainability Consortium, an independent organization of diverse global participants that work collaboratively to build a scientific foundation that drives innovation aimed at improving consumer product sustainability.

Specifically, Safeway is drawn to the Consortium’s product life cycle assessment (LCA) mission.  The company wants to aggregate data from throughout its supply chain –from primary sectors such as agriculture, dairy, packaging and fishery through industrial food processing to retail delivery –and then use this data to create a corporate-wide supply chain policy that encourages sustainable purchasing and manufacturing practices for the organization’s direct and indirect buying.

According to a press release, by joining the Consortium, Safeway is building momentum for science with supplier partners such as General Mill’s, Procter & Gamble, and PepsiCo. Ultimately, the goals are to better understand the complete scope of industry’s social and environmental footprint and to refine existing efforts at the company to continuously improve performance.

Kudos to Safeway for taking these steps and becoming a leader in modeling life cycle inventories. As Linda Nordgren, Safeway Group Vice President of Supply Chain & Strategic Sourcing, points out, the company will be using the new data it collects to uncover opportunities for cost savings and competitive advantage.

“This important research will build an important bridge to creating the standards for metrics by which our industry measures itself against sustainability goals uncovering key opportunities to eliminate waste and preserve natural resources,” she says. “Creating actionable data on the lifecycle impacts of food and agriculture will assist Safeway in creating its Environmentally Preferable Purchasing policy.”