Supermarket ranked top in a Greenpeace report evaluating progress made by UK supermarkets in slashing plastic use
Waitrose is expanding its experiment with packaging-free shopping by integrating unpacked items such as rice, pasta, cereals, and dried fruit into its regular aisles at a trailblazing store in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, the British supermarket giant announced yesterday.
Waitrose first launched a refillable range in some of its shops in 2019 under the 'Waitrose Unpacked' banner, an initiative intended to test demand from consumers for packaging-free shopping. The service offered a range of unpacked options, including coffee and washing detergent, that was dispensed from a self-service fixture.
The new trial will test whether customers are also keen to incorporate shopping for unpacked items into their routine 'business as usual' shopping trips, rather than visiting a separate part of the shop, the firm explained.
Waitrose's experiment with packaging free shopping has been highly successful, according to its own analysis. When the Unpacked service launched in Waitrose Botley Road shop in Oxford in summer 2019 it was originally intended as an 11 week test, but its popularity with customers led it to be continued there and expanded to a further three shops, in Wallingford, Abingdon, and Cheltenham.
A report published today by Waitrose shows that its customers are overwhelmingly supportive of the initiative, and that it was successful in eliminating nearly all single-use packaging. It found that 98 per cent of single-use packaging was eliminated across Unpacked products and that all plastic packaging was reduced by 83 per cent. Eighty per cent of customers surveyed for the report said they would shop using the Unpacked service again.
Feedback suggested customers want to see a broader range of Unpacked products, including more brands, and that Unpacked helped them feel like they were doing their bit for the environment.
The Unpacked initiative has helped Waitrose win accolades from green campaign groups. The chain tops a new table ranking UK supermarkets for their efforts to reduce plastics across its shops and products, which was released this week by Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigations Agency.
The study found that Waitrose reported an absolute plastic reduction of more than six per cent since 2017 across both its own-brand and branded range, helping it have the lowest plastic use per unit market share of the supermarkets analysed. It marks the second year in a row that Waitrose has topped the table.
"We are pleased that Greenpeace's league table has recognised our efforts to decrease our plastic packaging and pioneer unpacked shopping, but we know there's more to do. We know this remains as important to our customers as it does to us so we have continued to explore ways we can do more," said James Bailey, executive director at Waitrose.
"Waitrose Unpacked requires a fundamental change in shopping behaviour that has been ingrained for years. This next phase will help us to understand if we can make refillables a routine part of customers' shopping trips that would allow us to roll out Unpacked further in the future."
Waitrose is currently targeting a series of plastic and packaging goals including to ensure all own-label packaging is widely recycled, reusable or home compostable by 2023, to reduce single use plastic by 20 per cent 2021 and by 50 per cent by 2025, and to increase the proportion of resuable and refillable packaging across its own-label products by 50 per cent by 2025.