From Business to Social Leadership on Food Waste

Particularly striking to us is that, while society’s expectations have clearly intensified since the campaign began in 2012, the steps on the journey from business leadership to social leadership remain the same:

Start within the business. Step one for any business is focusing on the issue internally. That’s what Tesco did. Already strong at managing in-store food waste, the company leaders knew they could do even better. The company collected an enormous amount of data to pinpoint where the waste was showing up. That informed innovations regarding how Tesco processed, packaged and promoted their food. As employees saw how seriously the company was taking this issue, they became more serious themselves—it became a genuine source of pride internally and employees took ownership of the initiative in their own communities.

Go beyond the business. Tesco may be a huge company but it’s still only a sliver of the global food system. Improving its operational performance was an important first step, but leading on the issue systemically required going beyond the business and working across its value chain—from “farm to fork.” It set about engaging and partnering with farmers, suppliers, and customers to map the waste and reduce it.

Advocate for change. Even the most well-crafted campaigns flounder without committed leadership from the very top. Tesco’s executives took the issue of food waste out into the public arena. They did more than just describe what Tesco had done; they called for others in their industry to follow their lead and for suppliers to publish their waste data.

Make a bold first move. In 2013 Tesco became the first supermarket to publish its own food waste data. It established a new level of transparency and provided the baseline for improvement. It was a breakthrough moment, for the business and the industry. The World Wildlife Fund wrote that other retailers should follow Tesco’s lead and take food waste more seriously. For Tesco’s leadership, it was an unusual experience—people were reacting positively about the company.

A year later, Dave Lewis joined the company as CEO, and he took the efforts on food waste—as a leader, and as a business—even further. In our 2020 interview with Lewis, his call to action at the global level echoed the message we’d helped Tesco deliver in 2013: To drive real change, companies and governments need to publish their food waste data.

This campaign embodies Brunswick’s long-held belief that there’s only one way out of a reputational hole—lead. This is about much more than mitigating risk or getting off the back foot—it’s about making a genuine impact on a tough challenge. That requires more than tightening performance within your own business; it demands dealing with the systemic nature of the challenges. If you take on a societal issue with this sort of spirit, you transform a reputational risk into a leadership platform.

That was the essence of our campaign with Tesco, and it’s what we still do now: help companies find new ways to apply their scale, resources and expertise to demonstrate they are creating financial value hand-in-hand with social value.

Read more on Dave Lewis and how he lead the fight against global food waste while CEO of Tesco here.