UK supermarket Tesco and the British Nutrition Foundation have produced this report, which outlines recommendations for a healthy, sustainable diet. It uses the UK government’s Eatwell Guide as the basis for discussion and lists ways in which Tesco will encourage its customers to eat differently, including a “Healthy Choice” logo, reformulating products, committing to a 300% increase in meat alternative sales by 2025, and tackling food waste.

According to a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and ITV News, leading UK supermarkets and food outlets including Tesco, Asda, Lidl, Nando’s and McDonald’s are selling chicken that has been fed on soy produced in Brazil’s Cerrado savannah, which is threatened by deforestation. The chicken producer in question, Cargill, says that it has broken no rules and that it does not source from illegally deforested land.

In collaboration with WWF, the UK supermarket Tesco has announced a target of increasing sales of plant-based meat alternatives by 300% by 2025, relative to a 2018 baseline. To meet this goal, Tesco plans to introduce new plant-based products, try to keep prices affordable, work with suppliers to encourage innovation and display meat replacements alongside their animal-based equivalent.

US retailer Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue, has announced a goal to become a “regenerative company”. Specific targets include protecting, managing or restoring at least 50 million acres of land (which is equivalent to around 2% of the United States’ land area) and one million square miles of ocean (<1% of the global ocean area) by 2030, and achieving net zero emissions by 2040. The net zero target appears to cover only Walmart’s direct emissions, not food and product supply chain emissions.

This report by UK sustainability consultancy 3Keel assesses the quantity, origin and certification status of soy in the supply chains of animal products sold by 11 European retailers (including UK supermarkets such as ALDI, Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s). It finds that 25% of this soy footprint was claimed to be free of deforestation - an increase over the previous year’s figure. The remaining 75% of the soy footprint is not claimed to meet any deforestation-free standard.

According to this report by UK NGO Eating Better, the proportion of UK supermarket ready meals that is plant-based has increased significantly, from 3% in 2018 to 16% in March 2020, with another 9% being vegetarian but not wholly plant-based. Morrisons, Asda and Aldi doubled the size of their meat free range in the last two years. 

UK NGO the Food Foundation has published its Plating up Progress 2020 analysis of the progress being made by major UK-operating businesses within the food retail, foodservice and restaurant chain sectors across key themes relating to the transition to a healthy and sustainable food system.

UK supermarket Iceland has reduced its food waste by 23% over two years, according to this report. In 2019/2020, Iceland wasted food equivalent to 0.57% of sales. None of this waste went to landfill. The majority of food waste went to anaerobic digestion, with some surplus bread being converted to animal feed. Small amounts of surplus food were redistributed to people in need or used to brew beer.

This report from UK food waste NGO Feedback and the Changing Markets Foundation assesses ten UK supermarkets on their aquaculture supply chain policies and practices, particularly regarding the use of wild fish as feed for farmed fish. Seven out of ten supermarkets scored less than 30%, with ALDI performing worst at 12% and Tesco performing best at 60%. The report finds that aquaculture operations for UK supermarkets consumed 2.5 times as much wild fish as the amount of farmed fish produced.