Our Strategy
ESG performance is an important part of how we measure success. At Ahold Delhaize, we have a long history of reporting on our ESG performance and we find that stakeholders’ interest in these topics is increasing.
At Ahold Delhaize, our “elevate healthy and sustainable” and “cultivate best talent” growth drivers cover a large part of our ESG performance. At the same time, we continue to embed ESG further in our organization and ensure everyone is aware of its importance.
Our ESG ambitions and strategy are shaped by our most material ESG impacts, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), market knowledge from our great local brands and several ESG benchmarks, including the SAM Corporate Sustainability Assessment, MSCI, Sustainalytics and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). We also consider trends in our markets and around the world, feedback from our stakeholders, and how we align with global frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).
Through our annual ESG materiality assessment, we ask stakeholders for feedback on the scale of Ahold Delhaize’s impact on relevant topics and how much these topics influence their decision making on environmental, social and economic concerns. We use their feedback to determine our material ESG impacts, which, in turn, inform our Leading Together strategy. The three most material topics coming from our latest materiality assessment are Food waste, Healthy products and CO2 emissions and climate change.
Other material topics from the assessment are Sustainable agriculture, Sustainable packaging, Available and affordable products, Fair labor practices in the supply chain, Product safety and quality, Product transparency, Diversity and inclusion, Customer health and safety and Associate safety, health and well-being.
To reach our ambitions, we have committed to short- and long-term targets. We strive to further increase healthy sales of our own-brand products, eliminate food and plastic waste, aim for 100% diverse and inclusive workplaces and reach the science-based absolute reduction targets we have set for carbon emissions.
In addition to the focus areas outlined above, we have continued our journey to improve performance in associate development, product safety and sustainability, safety at work and local community connection. The ESG section in our Annual Report shows how we performed in 2020 against the ambitions and targets we set for our ESG performance.
Annual Report 2020
Read more about ESG in our 2020 Annual Report
