Perekrestok, the largest supermarket chain in our country, embarked on the path of sustainable development in 2019. We tell you what tasks Perekrestok sets for itself now
Task
Help consumers make healthy food choices and motivate them to consume consciously, use resources sustainably and reduce waste.
Background and motivation
X5 Retail Group, which includes Perekrestok stores, adopted long-term sustainability goals and strategy in December 2019. The strategy is based on 17 global goals until 2030, which were developed and adopted at the UN level in 2015.
Eating well, eating wisely and reducing waste reflect the global goals of sustainable development.
To better understand the requests and set the right goals for themselves, the company’s employees conducted surveys and communicated with their customers and partners.
Solutions
- Healthy lifestyle
In October last year, Perekrestok adopted a healthy lifestyle strategy, and since December, single zones with healthy lifestyle products began to appear in stores. There are already more than 1,3 thousand useful products in the assortment of the network.
“To help our customers eat better, we have developed the Perekrestok Healthy Eating Basket, which contains 12 products more than in the Rosstat basket. Our basket contains more fruits, vegetables and less bread, red meat, sugar and fast carbohydrates,” says Tatyana Stepanova, marketing director of the Perekrestok chain of stores.
The task was also to ensure that the healthy food basket for a month did not differ much in price from the usual consumer basket. As a result, for Moscow the cost of the average basket of Perekrestok is 7 rubles. The set of products is designed so that one adult person per day receives a daily calorie intake and eats at least 339 grams of vegetables and fruits.
In order not to get confused and make it easier to collect a healthy lifestyle basket, Perekrestok has developed special routes for good habits. This is a navigation that helps the buyer to choose a useful product. The path begins with the department of vegetables and fruits – a basket of healthy food should consist of half of fresh vegetables and fruits.
You can find information about proper nutrition on the site about myths and legends about healthy eating: is it really necessary to give up your favorite foods, how to eat not only carrots and more. The Crossroads is doing this project together with, in the same place every quarter the store publishes a healthy food basket index.
Perekrestok has its own healthy brand, Green Line: dairy products, cheeses, sausages, baby food and ready meals. These products are 100% natural and have a short expiration date to deliver the benefits.
Partners come to Perekrestok with their ideas. For example, together with Danone, an interactive online course on responsible consumption “One Planet. One health. His idea is to educate people about conscious food choices, balanced nutrition and how to reduce landfill waste. After passing the test, a person receives a discount in Perekrestok stores for products from Danone.
- Waste reduction and recycling
All Perekrestok stores send 100% of cardboard and film from suppliers for recycling. Used shopping trolleys are also available for rent. Some of the baskets where people put food are made from recycled plastic. Soon all baskets will be recycled. In addition, Perekrestok stores, where there are cafes, are beginning to introduce separate waste collection.
There are also recycled materials in Perekrestok’s branded bags – 35% of them consist of recycled plastic. But stores also offer alternatives to disposable bags: reusable grocery bags and bags for weighing fruits and vegetables.
There is an option to use paper bags. In 50 Perekrestok stores, they began to offer them instead of plastic ones in order to weigh vegetables or fruits. Paper is also used as a wrapper for cutting.
In Moscow, in seven Perekrestok stores, plastic bottles and bottles can be recycled in special vending machines. For this, a person receives a discount on some products from Unilever.
Perekrestok also works with non-standard waste, such as batteries and toothbrushes. In 62 stores there are boxes for used batteries, which are taken to special factories for recycling. Also, in Perekrestok stores throughout our country, you can recycle toothbrushes, which will then turn into paving slabs. This promotion is another example of collaboration with partners, in this case, with the Splat brand.
The results
The “Healthy Food Basket” project has been launched in many retail outlets of the network, special healthy lifestyle zones and healthy lifestyle outlets have appeared in 100% of Perekrestok stores, where healthy products for customers are already selected in advance. The portal about healthy and proper nutrition was visited by more than 37 thousand unique users. About 1 people started taking the online course on responsible consumption.
A special portal has appeared for suppliers, where they can indicate one of the nine healthy lifestyle features of their products – this is how the product gets on the shelves of proper nutrition, receiving additional promotion from the store.
In 2019, X5 sent more than 590 million kg of waste for recycling, and volumes continue to grow: in the first half of 2020, the amount of waste that went to recycling was 35% more than in the same period of the previous year. People handed over more than 27 bottles to plastic vending machines in one year.
It turned out to be a successful experiment to sell reusable alternatives instead of regular bags. Over the past year, stores sold about 3 million reusable bags, and only in the first half of 2020 – 2 million such bags.
Perekrestok completely abandoned mercury-containing lamps in its stores and switched to energy-saving ones. This has reduced electricity consumption, and stores no longer produce hazard class 1 waste.
Plans and prospects
In terms of proper nutrition, Perekrestok aims to further expand the number of products for a healthy lifestyle. In five years, the retailer plans to make the entire range 15% from healthy lifestyle products.
Stores plan to continue to reduce waste and reduce waste generation to 2023% by 10. Consumer waste can be reduced with smart, sustainable packaging that is easy to recycle or reuse. Perekrestok wants to increase the share of its own brands in such packaging to 50%.
“In the near future, Perekrestok will move away from paper checks and switch to electronic ones. In a number of stores, we already use electronic price tags to minimize the use of paper,” says Tatyana Stepanova.
More information and news about how business, law and society are “greener” in our Telegram channel. Subscribe.