The Waitrose supermarket chain is to publish its first ethical trading report early next year.
The report, which will outline progress the UK food retailer has made on supply chain tracking, will draw information from Waitrose’s participation in the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a coalition of companies and NGOs that aims to promote improvements in working conditions throughout the world.
It will also use data from an internal auditing exercise that has attempted to assess the social and ethical performance of Waitrose suppliers.
Deborah Smith of the social auditing consultancy EQ Management, which has been advising Waitrose on its ethical sourcing policies, said the document would outline ‘where Waitrose should focus its efforts in terms of future social inspections and supply chain mapping across all buying departments’.
She added that its recommendations would particularly focus on how each supplier ‘can make improvements on health and safety, freedom of association and anti-discrimination policies.’
Some of the recommendations will stem from Waitrose’s work this summer on an ETI pilot scheme in Zimbabwe, which has given the company an indication of how it can improve its supply chain monitoring.
As part of the pilot, a social auditing expert from Europe was sent to inspect one of the company’s farm suppliers in Zimbabwe.
Smith said the inspection found ‘high social standards with few issues of concern’, but concluded that ‘using a non-indigenous representative from a client supermarket to undertake a social audit made the process of interviewing more difficult for cultural and commercial reasons’.
The visit also concluded that:
detailed information about the supplier should be collected ‘well in advance’ of any visit, ‘so that the audit can be contained within the desirable threshold of one day’
interviewing of stakeholders should be combined with site walkabouts and paperwork inspections ‘to ensure the widest possible perspective’
inspections should be handled sensitively to avoid the risk of suppliers feeling victimised
Smith said there were plans to extend the ETI pilot to include the establishment of an indigenous social accountability unit in Zimbabwe and ‘to continue to broaden the scope to include more farms’.
Waitrose, the food division of John Lewis Partnership, has also conducted its own internal pilot auditing of fruit, horticulture and vegetable suppliers.
Smith said initial findings showed ‘a broad spectrum of awareness of social and ethical issues’ and added: ‘there are very positive signs that some of Waitrose’s main UK-based importers have already established ethical policies and auditing systems.’
She warned, however, that a number of other suppliers had failed to take such considerations into account, ‘either because the perceived need to do so has not been apparent, or due to a sense that anything sourced in developed countries, particularly Europe and North America, does not need monitoring in this way.’
She said this was a misconception, as early results from supply chain questionnaires had shown that ‘workers in some third world countries have better protection than, for instance, those in the US’.
Waitrose owns and runs 121 supermarkets, all of which are in the UK.