Tesco has committed to a 300 percent increase in its sales of meat alternatives by 2025, making it the first UK retailer to set plant-based sales targets. 

The goal is part of a range of measures dubbed the Sustainable Basket Metric, developed in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to support sustainable food production. 

“These measures are just part of the work we’re doing with WWF, bringing together for the first time a host of sustainability metrics to help us halve the environmental impact of food production,” says Dave Lewis, Tesco CEO. 

To reach its meat alternatives sales target, Tesco has outlined four areas of focus: 

• Availability: Introduce and grow plant-based meat alternatives across all its stores, with products across 20 different categories including ready meals, breaded meat alternatives, plant-based sausages, burgers, quiches, pies and party food.
• Affordability: Continue to invest in value so that affordability is not a barrier to buying plant-based meat alternatives.
• Innovation: Work with suppliers to bring innovative products to customers.
• Visibility: Provide a meat alternative wher a meat version is featured, for example, Richmond sausages and Richmond plant-based sausages to feature together.

Tesco and WWF launched the Metric in 2019. So far, the retailer has achieved 11 percent of its target to reduce the environmental impact of the average shopping basket by half. 

The Metric measures environmental impacts of food across seven different categories: climate change, deforestation, sustainable diets, sustainable agriculture, marine sustainability, food waste and packaging waste.

Measuring progress
Tesco has committed to publishing the sales of plant-based proteins as a percentage of overall protein sales every year to track its progress. 

“We know from our experience in tackling food waste that transparency and setting ambitious targets are the first steps towards becoming a more sustainable business,” details Lewis.  

Tesco became the first UK retailer to publish its food waste data in 2013, and it hopes this new level of transparency on protein sales will help encourage the rest of the food industry to make similar commitments.

“Our transparency on protein sales and our new sales target for meat alternatives gives us the platform to become more sustainable and will provide customers with even more choice,” Lewis adds.  

Food’s true impact
Food production, specifically meat and dairy production, has a significant impact on precious habitats like the Amazon and Cerrado regions of Brazil and is acknowledged as a major contributor to climate change, notes the WWF. 

“It’s great to see this sector-leading step from Tesco. Tackling the environmental impact of what we eat and how we produce it has never been so urgent,” says Tanya Steele, WWF CEO.

In the last 50 years, wildlife populations have declined on average by 68 percent, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020. The report identified the food system as “the biggest culprit.”

According to Steele, knowledge about the food system’s detrimental impact presents one of the greatest opportunities to reverse the trend. “Rebalancing our diets is a critical part of that.” 

“Food businesses cannot have a sustainable future without transparency. They need to know wher they are starting from to know wher they are going. We ask all food businesses to join us on this journey,” she adds. 

A call to industry 
The two organizations are now calling on other food businesses to increase their transparency around sustainability measures and consider the Sustainable Basket Metric as a framework and way of monitoring progress towards making the food system more sustainable.

“We can’t accomplish the transformational change needed for a truly sustainable food system on our own, so we’re calling on the whole industry to play its role, starting with increased transparency on its sustainability impacts,” says Lewis 

“We also call on the government to do more by helping to scale up innovations and create a level playing field to ensure companies drive sustainability in their supply chains,” he concludes.