Sustainability and supermarkets

The majority of us do our food shopping in supermarkets. In 2013, Colruyt took first place in providing consumers the Belgian food market, with Delhaize in second place, closely followed by Carrefour.

I think all of us are aware of the environmental issues surrounding growing and transporting food. As consumers, every decision we make has consequences. I’m not going to get into discussions over flying in green beans from Kenya versus growing bananas in artificially lit and heated environments in countries where they could not otherwise grow. Neither do I claim to offer exhaustive research on sustainable food – I’m just trying to throw a bit of light on the topic so that I – and maybe you – can make more informed decisions about how and where we feed ourselves.

First thing up is finding out how the supermarkets fill their shelves so, here we go! And before we go any further, just be aware that I got all of the information below from the supermarket’s own websites, so if course they’re all going to say that they are wonderful at this whole environmental thing! Hmmm.

I'm going to look at Colruyt in this first post, followed by Delhaize and Carrefour in the coming weeks. 

By the way, Felicity Cloake wrote about the food shopping dilemma in this article recently.