NEW YORK — Walmart announced an initiative Monday to reduce the environmental impact of the food it sells and help its customers improve the nutrition in their diets.
The retailer is the nation’s largest grocer, and food is its biggest business. So it has enormous clout with food producers and big food-processing companies — influence that it can use, for example, to sway how much water is used to produce a crop, or shorten the distance a load of strawberries is shipped, thus reducing consumption of fossil fuels.
“What’s become clearer and clearer is that we have a real challenge globally around feeding the world’s growing population in a way that doesn’t cut down every last tree and use every last drop of water,” said Kathleen McLaughlin, senior vice president for global sustainability at Walmart.
Agriculture’s role in climate change was central to the UN Climate Summit in New York last month. The severe drought in California has been a stark illustration of how much water is required to produce the fruit and vegetables that consumers increasingly demand, and there is growing awareness about how food waste and animal husbandry generate greenhouse gases.
Walmart’s new effort to enhance sustainability has four legs: reducing the overall cost of food, including its environmental footprint; increasing access to more nutritious food; making it easier for its customers to eat healthier foods; and improving food safety, with greater transparency about where food comes from and how it is produced.
The company has been working with a variety of partners, ranging from nonprofit groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and Feeding America to big food manufacturers like General Mills and PepsiCo, as well as agricultural businesses like Monsanto and Cargill.
General Mills and Walmart, for example, are sponsoring a challenge that will reward farmers who show the most progress in reducing emissions through better management of fertilizer application.
To reduce food waste, Walmart has begun developing more ways to use a “whole crop” in its private label food production and placing an emphasis on more efficient ordering to reduce spoilage.
It also is working to make healthier foods more broadly accessible through lower prices and building stores in food deserts. McLaughlin said Walmart would supply 4 billion more meals to needy people over the next five years with greater donations to food banks and by working with schools and other institutions to help them figure out what equipment they need to prepare and store more fresh foods.
Through organizations like 4-H and the American Heart Association, the company will offer education on how to shop for fruits and vegetables and how to prepare them. It plans to track that program by counting the number of meals that consumers receiving such information prepare at home as well as whether fruit and vegetable consumption increases.
“We want to democratize healthy eating,” McLaughlin said. “You shouldn’t have to pay more to eat something nutritious.”
Walmart will use technology to propel healthier, more sustainable eating. For instance, it will ask suppliers to use a tool called Adapt-N that gives farmers information about soil, weather, temperature, and seeds to help make better decisions about farm inputs.
And it is adding much more information to bar codes in its Sam’s Club stores that shoppers can download with their mobile devices.
“We want to reduce the confusion that’s out there about what consumers should be eating in terms of their own health and what they should be buying in terms of what’s good for the planet,” McLaughlin said.