Corporate Social Responsibility

Our customers tell us that they want a reliable shopping trip. But they also want businesses, including supermarkets, to be good neighbours and to be responsible, fair and honest.

We serve thousands of communities around the world. We are part of these neighbourhoods and always aim to play a positive role in them. In a rapidly changing world being a good neighbour has never been more important. That’s why we’ve developed five new Community Promises to help us to deliver our ambitions.

Every day thousands of Tesco staff work hard to put these Community Promises into action – whether through helping the environment, enabling customers to lead healthier lifestyles, learning and using new skills, supporting local producers or getting involved with local community groups.

Our five promises go to the heart of how we do business, and help us to keep focused on what is important in our communities.

Actively supporting local communities

A good example here is our Community Champions. The idea is that we ask a person who loves working with the local school, a local charity or local organisation to do just that – help them. That may be helping the local police raise awareness of car seats for children, or collecting for a local charity in the store. This is a simple idea, one that we are introducing around the world. We have already appointed 58 Champions in our UK stores and depots, 27 Champions in China, and are introducing them in the Czech and Slovak Republics too.

Buying & Selling our Products Responsibly

We have thousands of suppliers around the world. We want those suppliers to be dynamic and innovative – but also to treat their employees fairly, and look after the environment. That means more local sourcing – of beer in Poland and rambutan in Thailand. It also means checking where everything we buy comes from, and ensuring the suppliers meets our standards.

Caring for the environment

We have been working hard to play a positive role, by reducing our direct environmental impact and encouraging suppliers and customers to do the same.

Our targets set in 2007, are:

• to halve the carbon emissions from all new stores we build worldwide between now and 2020 compared with an equivalent store built in 2006;
• to halve emissions from our existing stores and distribution centres worldwide by 2020; and
• to halve the CO2e created per case of goods delivered worldwide by 2012, compared with 2006.

Last year we invested £86 million in energy-saving technology for our stores, including low-energy lighting, energy-efficient bakery ovens, wind turbines, combined heat and power (CHP) and hanging curtains on freezer doors. We have halved our UK energy use per square foot since 2000. By the end of the year we will have at least one environmental store in each of our international markets.

Giving customers healthy choices

This isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s what our customers want us to do. New healthier ranges; encouraging customers to eat more fruit and vegetables; better nutritional labelling – all these things help people eat healthier diets. We can also take a direct role – by encouraging people to get healthy. In Thailand we got 2.4m people active in a national aerobics competition earlier this year. In the Czech Republic and Malaysia we are getting people active and at the same time raising money for cancer research.

Good jobs for local people

Tesco’s growth has meant we can give people opportunities to get a job, a steady income and real security for them and their family. That means local jobs, so local communities share in our success. Over the last ten years we have created on average one new job every 20 minutes. Thousands of those jobs have gone to people who had been unemployed for some time, but who can now enjoy the benefits of working for Tesco. For example, in the US, we’ve employed nearly 2,500 people in new, quality jobs. A number of them, such as our Compton and South LA stores, are in areas traditionally under served by modern retailers and where the benefits we bring, such as job creation, make a real difference.