Our challenges
Our challenges
The sustainability imperative poses many challenges, including:
- Strategic alignment: Our sustainability initiatives must align with our corporate strategy as well as operating and financial expectations.
- Setting priorities: There are many possible sustainability-related actions at Sobeys, but it is essential to focus on those that will have the most impact and are cost-efficient.
- Identifying solutions: Sensing significant business opportunities, companies are flooding the market with potential solutions to the challenges posed by the increased focus on sustainability. It has become challenging to find both the time and expertise to review the opportunities and identify the solutions with the strongest potential.
- Integration: Achieving our sustainability goals must migrate from being the responsibility of a few to influencing every employee’s day-to-day activities.
- Education: The success of our sustainability initiatives requires educating our staff and management about our specific issues and goals as well as each employee’s role in advancing sustainability at Sobeys.
- Changing behaviours: Many of the easier, more cost-effective actions are related to behaviour in our operations and our purchasing decisions. These are always given priority over capital investments.
- Measurement: Our journey includes measuring things that we have seldom measured before. As a result, our information is not as complete as we would like. However, we have made a solid start and we’re continuing to capture more data. This will allow us to establish more baselines, which in turn will make it possible to develop more targets and to track our progress. We’re also developing the reporting systems that will make our environmental performance data visible to those operating our businesses day-to-day, which will make the data more operationally actionable.
