Carrefour

Sustainable development strategy
Carrefour has a process for identifying and prioritising its most relevant sustainability topics through its materiality assessment and discloses its 24 priority issues. The company also aligns its sustainability objectives with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and discloses targets and reporting for most issues related to the environment, nutrition and social topics across its value chain.

Plastic use and packaging waste
Carrefour has several targets to reduce plastic use and packaging waste. These include eliminating unnecessary packaging and targeting 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging for its own-brand products by 2025. In terms of value chain collaboration, the company discloses a number of customer initiatives to promote reusable packaging solutions, and it participates in joint initiatives and partnerships to reduce packaging waste.

No leading practices were identified for the company in the nutrition measurement area.

No leading practices were identified for the company in the social inclusion measurement area.

Governance and accountability for sustainable development
Carrefour discloses the roles and responsibilities for implementing its food transition and corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies, which include oversight by the Group Executive Committee and board of directors. As part of the annual variable compensation to the chairperson and chief executive officer, non-financial objectives related to CSR are included. The company can further improve its accountability for sustainable development by expanding its non-financial objectives to cover the three benchmark dimensions of environment, nutrition and social inclusion.

Stakeholder engagement
While the company provides an overview of its stakeholder engagement activities, it can further strengthen its reporting by disclosing the process for identifying stakeholders and conducting engagement activities covering sustainability topics across all three benchmark measurement areas (environment, nutrition and social inclusion) across its value chain.

Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas emissions
Carrefour has reduction targets for its scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and reports progress against the targets. However, it is yet to align its reduction targets with a 1.5-degree trajectory. While the company has a reduction target for its indirect emissions (scope 3), it only provides limited reporting against the target.

Protection of terrestrial natural ecosystems
As part of its zero-deforestation commitment, Carrefour has set targets for some of its high-risk commodities such as palm oil, beef, soya and cocoa. However, the company only reports progress against some of these targets.

Fertiliser and pesticide use
Carrefour discloses its commitment to optimise the use of pesticides through its 2022 sales target to increase its offering of organic products. The company can further strengthen its commitment by expanding its target to increase the percentage of food sourced from suppliers that optimise both the use of pesticides and fertilisers.

Water use
While the company discloses its total water consumption, it does not demonstrate quantitative reductions in water consumption across its operations. Moreover, no evidence of reduction targets for its own operations or engagement with suppliers regarding water use was found.

Food loss and waste
Carrefour has a target to achieve a 50% reduction in food waste by 2025 and reports progress against the target. In addition, the company works with suppliers to review use-by dates, resulting in more than 400 Carrefour-brand products having their use-by or best-before dates extended. While the company also discloses several customer education initiatives to reduce food waste, no evidence of activities to prevent food waste with value chain partners was found.

Availability of healthy foods
While the company provides qualitative evidence of reducing sugar and salt levels in its products, it can strengthen its disclosure by providing quantitative evidence of improving the nutritional quality of its products and setting targets to increase the percentage of such healthy food products in its portfolio.

Accessibility and affordability of healthy foods
While the company has a commitment to improve the accessibility and affordability of healthy foods as part of its sustainability strategy, no evidence of strategic commercial activities designed to improve the accessibility and affordability of healthy foods was found.

Clear and transparent labelling
Carrefour demonstrates its commitment to make nutritional information available to consumers in a clear, intuitive and accurate way through its adoption of front-of-pack labelling schemes such as Nutri-Score for its own-brand products in France and on the website. Its aim is to have these labels appear on 7,000 products in France and Europe more widely by 2022. The company can further strengthen its commitment by disclosing the percentage of products for which such labelling commitments have been rolled out.

Responsible marketing
While Carrefour provides evidence of initiatives promoting healthy foods to consumers, no evidence of a responsible marketing commitment or policy aligned with international codes and guidelines was found.

Workforce nutrition
Carrefour demonstrates that it is committed to workforce nutrition through programmes on nutrition education and provides healthy food at work. The company has an opportunity to further strengthen its commitment towards workforce nutrition by promoting nutrition-focused health checks and disclosing quantitative evidence on the percentage of food offerings with healthy options.

Food safety
The company provides evidence of the percentage of its manufacturing sites certified to the International Featured Standard and British Retail Consortium standards. However, no disclosure was found regarding the percentage of food suppliers certified to a food safety certification programme recognised by the Global Food Safety Initiative or other widely recognised certification.

Child labour
Carrefour indicates that it will not use child labour and requires that its supply chain adheres to the same standard. While the company discloses its monitoring process for its supply chain, no evidence was found regarding age-verification requirements for its suppliers or monitoring processes for its own operations.

Forced labour
Carrefour indicates that it will not use forced labour, that it does not retain workers’ personal documents or restrict workers’ freedom of movement in its own operations and requires that its supply chain partners adhere to the same standards. The company commits to not interfering with the right of workers to form or join trade unions and to bargain collectively. However, no sufficient evidence was found regarding prohibiting any form of intimidation of workers seeking to exercise these rights. While the company provides evidence of monitoring processes for its supply chain, no evidence of monitoring processes in its own operations was found.

Living wage
While Carrefour provides evidence of including living wage requirements in its contractual arrangements with suppliers, it is unclear if the company has achieved paying a living wage for all its workers across its own operations.

Health and safety of vulnerable groups
While the company discloses supplier requirements regarding health and safety, no evidence was found of specific recognition of the health and safety risks to vulnerable groups, such as migrant and temporary labourers, women and young farmers.

Farmer and fisher productivity and resilience
Carrefour provides evidence of activities to support farmer productivity and resilience through initiatives such as supporting French farmers transition to organic farming and offering sustainable prices for Spanish fishers. However, it is yet to report on the impact of these support activities.

Land rights
The company does not commit to recognising and respecting the legitimate tenure rights related to the ownership and use of land of local communities.

Carrefour commits to respecting human rights and the ILO core labour rights in its supply chain. The company displays a comprehensive human rights due diligence process which includes the identification, assessment, and action plan for the salient human rights risks in its operations and supply chain. As part of this process, the company provides grievance mechanisms that are accessible to employees, but it can strengthen this process by also providing grievance mechanisms for external individuals and communities.

While Carrefour commits to respecting the health and safety of workers in its supply chain, the company can improve by strengthening its policy and disclosure of quantitative information on the health and safety of workers in its own operations. The company also discloses its commitments and limited information on living wages, working hours, workforce diversity, and gender equality and women’s empowerment fundamentals. Carrefour can improve its commitment towards collective bargaining by disclosing the proportion of its workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements as well as how it to works to support its supply chain partners in relation to freedom of association and collective bargaining.

Carrefour publicly commits to protecting personal data and has a privacy statement on the use of personal data. There is room for Carrefour to improve its disclosure on income tax payments on a country-by-country basis and on its anti-bribery and anti-corruption grievance mechanism. It can also strengthen its policies on lobbying and political engagement.