'It takes collaboration and innovation to realise our ambitions'

“We choose the right packaging by weighing different aspects pertaining to marketing, purchasing and quality. What is the best packaging for the customer, the environment and Albert Heijn itself, e.g. from a cost perspective? We base our decisions on end-to-end LCAs. If plastic achieves the highest score, e.g. with regard to environmental impact, we will use plastic. However, we will do our best to make this packaging as thin and flat as possible and ensure it is properly recyclable. That is one of our ambitions as a company. Justifying that choice can be difficult at times. Plastic has a poor image. Many of our customers know that a product's shelf life is improved by the plastic packaging, but some of them simply want to live a plastic-free life. We are facilitating that choice in more and more ways; not simply because our customers demand it, but also because we want to do what we can to reduce our environmental impact.”

“Today, more than five hundred AH stores have a dry-misting system and that number continues to grow every week. Most vegetables and fruits are presented without any packaging. The shelf life and quality of these products are comparable to their packaged counterparts. However, the results were not that great for some of the one hundred products. Some products simply need a form of packaging. We are constantly learning and improving in order to ultimately realise our ambition of 100% recyclability.”

“The ambitions we formulate inspire suppliers to take action themselves. Especially for our store brands, we can explicitly define the specifications we want. Still, it takes collaboration and innovation to realise our ambitions. We strive for 100% recyclable, but the capacity to realise that is not available yet. The availability of the raw material presents a challenge. On top of that, our suppliers do not deliver exclusively in the Netherlands. Making packaging materials more sustainable is an international problem that must be tackled at an international scale. What Albert Heijn can do is put the question to our suppliers, which then makes it possible to take the next step. Taking full responsibility is a bigger challenge, however. It also requires a lot from other parties.”

After all, acceleration comes mainly from collaboration across the entire chain, by creating innovation together"

“When it comes to packaging materials, we use the 4R principle: reduce, reuse, recycle and renew. We are gradually reducing the amount of packaging materials we use. Our focus is on plastic because it is an important and commonly used material. Look at our containers for fresh fruit, for example, where we replaced the lid with a topseal. This has resulted in a significant reduction of 500,000 kg of plastic per year, while customers still get the same quality and shelf life. All told, we reduced our use of packaging materials by nearly three percent in 2019, which amounts to 2.2 million kilos. Looking at plastic alone, we achieved a reduction of six percent.”

“With regard to reuse, we sold one million nylon bags in the fruit and vegetables and bread departments in 2019. I think this is an excellent example of how you can teach customers to reuse things, just like we have done with the large, sturdy shopping bags in the past. This measure also resulted in a twenty percent reduction of the use of plastic carrier bags. In the meat department, we introduced a different seal. Although we are not necessarily using less or lighter plastic, the new seal is recyclable. If we cannot achieve any of the first three Rs, we are left with the fourth: looking for different solutions. That is what we did for our biological milk by introducing a packaging made from bio-PE from sugar cane. The market share is relatively small; it is a premium concept that is still quite costly. In the long run, I definitely expect to see more solutions that utilise bio-plastics, for example for shampoo bottles and such.”

“The fact that so many major parties have signed the Plastic Pact makes life a lot easier. It has given the Netherlands a head start on the rest of Europe. I am not saying that Albert Heijn can achieve the targets all by itself. Our store brands are not all produced locally; in fact, we produce and package products at around ten thousand locations around the world. That means we depend on myriad other parties. However, it is certainly true that we can bring about a movement one step at a time. The collectivity makes it possible to achieve even better results. Perhaps the government could play a bigger role in all this, but I'm not sure if that would necessarily speed things up. The best way to do that is through effective collaboration along the entire chain and by creating innovation together.”