METRO Cash & Carry offers its customers a wide variety of proven environmentally friendly and socially responsible products throughout its whole food and non-food assortment. By that, we give our customers the opportunity of having an impact on environmental and working conditions along the entire value chain. For METRO Cash & Carry, the following areas are particularly relevant.
Ethical husbandry | animal protection
Meat and meat products as well as eggs rank among the most important and sensible product groups in our METRO Cash & Carry wholesale stores. Alongside absolute freshness and high quality, animal welfare is extremely important to us when selecting suppliers. Our customers are also placing increasing value on ethical husbandry. They want to know where the food we sell them comes from and what conditions it was produced under.
Sustainable fish
For our professional customers, fish is a highly essential and delicate product. Meanwhile fish is a fluctuant natural resource that has to be used sustainably. To ensure the long-term protection of fish stocks, METRO Cash & Carry has developed its Procurement Policy for Fish and Seafood. With this METRO Cash & Carry takes responsibility at various stages of the value chain and develops measures to promote responsible fishing in accordance with our customers’ needs, nature and people working in the seafood industry.
Sustainable palm oil
Palm oil is an ingredient of many products, e.g. sweets, bakery goods, margarine and cosmetics. It is extracted from oil palms that only grow in the tropics, where wrongly implemented cultivation can have negative side effects for local populations or the environment. Certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO) is produced by palm oil plantations which have been independently audited and found to comply with the globally agreed environmental standards devised by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). These sustainability criteria relate to social, environmental and economic good practice.
As a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil RSPO, METRO GROUP and accordingly the sales line METRO Cash & Carry committed to integrating the organisation’s principles into their management system and communicating them to customers and suppliers. RSPO actively promotes sustainable cultivation methods and shows alternatives to the use of non-sustainable palm oil.
Palm oil procurement policy
Reducing the environmental and social impact along the supply chain is an important component of our business practices. We aim to purchase all of our products containing palm oil with the "segregated" or "identity preserved" system of the RSPO by 2020 according to the market availability.
- Segregation: Strict separation of conventional and sustainable palm oil, and certification from oil mill to end consumer on a yearly basis
- Identity preserved: Certification from plantation to end consumer on a yearly basis
These methods have the greatest benefit in terms of environmental protection and full traceability.
All countries within METRO Cash & Carry organisation are implementing an overall palm oil procurement policy.