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CSR And Sustainability Spotlight: Tesco Ireland

/ 31st August 2021 /
Jake Mulcahy

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As a leading food retailer, Tesco is one of Ireland’s largest private sector employers, responsible for over 45,000 jobs, including over 13,000 colleagues nationwide. In partnering with over 490 Irish suppliers, our purchases of Irish agri-food support almost 14,000 farming families and help to deliver more than €2.9 billion to Ireland’s economy.

We believe that every little help makes a big difference. Our Little Helps Plan shapes our long-term approach to sustainability, with four key pillars: People, Product, Places and Planet. These pillars guide us in making the right decisions for our colleagues and customers, and in serving our communities a little better every day.

Our People

Everyone is welcome at Tesco. Our goal is to build an equal opportunity workplace, developing a company culture and a diverse team that represents our communities. We are proud to sponsor the Dublin and Cork Pride festivals, supporting our colleagues to be themselves at work, and to feel valued and respected every day. This year, we were recognised as a Great Place to Work for the fourth consecutive year and again as the Best Workplace for Women in Ireland – something of which we are hugely proud.

Our Products

We believe that no good food should go to waste. Since 2014, we have partnered with FoodCloud to redistribute 14 million meals to more than 460 charitable organisations, including afterschool clubs, youth groups, OAP/elderly support services and more. As part of our support for Irish agri-food, we’ve formed the first retail partnership with Love Irish Food, to grow awareness of its member products in our stores. We hope that this partnership will benefit these small and medium food companies around Ireland.

We are working to bring little helps to our customers through the products that we sell. For example, we’re covering the VAT on Tesco sun protection products, to increase awareness around sun safety and to help make quality sun protection products more accessible and affordable.

Our Planet

As we work towards carbon neutrality, we’re one of the few retail companies to have received the Business in the Community (BITC) Business Working Responsibly Mark for commitments to sustainability and CSR. We proudly recommitted to BITC’s Low Carbon Pledge, and we are a member of Repak and a signatory on the Repak’s Plastics Pledge.

In Association with

Some of this work involves innovative ideas as to how we cool our refrigerators and how we light our stores. We’re partnering with Green Generation, which is producing renewable gas from anaerobic digestion of surplus food that was not donated, to power six of our stores.

Other work includes minimising the impact of packaging through our 4R approach: Remove, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. We are proud to be the first Irish retailer to provide a soft-plastic recycling solution in partnership with Paltech. In store, Tesco customers can now leave their soft packaging, which Paltech turns into structures such as car park barriers and signage for use in our stores.

We’ve also worked with ESB to provide almost 50 electric vehicle charging points in Tesco stores nationwide.

Our Places

Through the Tesco Community Fund, in the past six years we have donated more than €5m to charities and community groups in cities, towns and villages nationwide. We’re proud that the fund has supported over 20,000 community groups to date. Thanks to the generosity of our colleagues and customers, over €6m has been raised since 2014 for Children’s Health Foundation Temple Street. These funds have been used to purchase more than 330 pieces of vital medical equipment for the little heroes in CHI at Temple Street.

Now, more than ever, every little helps.

Photo: Tesco Swords Airside workers Erica Flemming, Zalifa Youshi, Kamila Renjin, Hassan Bajwa, Aoife Mooney, Zemzem Ali, and Barbara Boroweic (Pic: Naoise Culhane)

Tesco Ireland

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