Sainsbury's CIO discusses green agenda: 'Sustainability is a big part of our procurement process'

Retailer’s Group CIO says the organisation is reducing its data centre footprint, electrifying the logistics fleet and looking into new refrigeration and lighting technologies

Sainsbury's is making efforts to improve its sustainability, including making the topic a central theme of its technology procurement strategy.

The retailer's group CIO Phil Jordan recently told Computing that this is a "key difference from three or four years ago."

"Sustainability is a key buying consideration for us," he said, referring to technology tools, platforms and vendors.

"It's a massive consideration, both in the individual company's plans for their own ESG agenda and also making sure our interaction with them is as environmentally friendly as possible."

Whilst many organisations might claim to hold sustainability as a key procurement metric, Jordan said that Sainsbury's is different in the lengths it goes to ensure that vendors' environmental claims are accurate.

"When we partner with someone we put an awful lot of requirements on them to set and maintain the core standards that we hold. And we're renowned for that quality and value balance.

"We have very clear guidance, and there's an awful lot of active and proactive assurance that goes on with the commercial teams to assess our supply chain."

He added that this involves lots of site visits.

"We'll turn up at farms, distributors will turn up at manufacturers at times. We routinely test and check that people are working with the same ethical values we hold."

Jordan admitted that this means that they occasionally do find some firms who aren't complying.

"Sometimes that goes wrong. We occasionally find suppliers who aren't complying with the policies we've set. Then we'll start working with them to improve.

"It's part of what being Sainsbury's means; to have that confidence that when we source products, we source it ethically. And that throughout the whole supply chain, we're trying to minimise the sort of negative environmental impact of moving products around the world.

"It's not a technology thing but the single biggest thing that the UK could do to reduce carbon emissions is to not eat out of season food, because that's comes from every corner of the world."

Jordan also discussed other elements of the organisation's sustainability drive.

"We're also focused on getting out of on premise data centres. We have a pretty aggressive agenda to get down to two from the many we had a few years ago.

"That's good for scope one and two emissions, but clearly we also expect our cloud providers to manage their own emissions.

"So our data centre migration and cloud-first strategy is the big sustainability driver for us, but there are other technology elements like the electrification of our fleet, refrigeration technology and looking into LED lighting in our stores."

Earlier he told Computing that the organisation is rebuilding its data capability in order to improve automation and decision-making.

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