Tesco ties top executive bonuses to slashing food waste by half
Tesco is accelerating its pledge to halve food waste and moving forward its target by five years to 2025.
And in a first for a major retailer, Tesco will be aligning executive pay performance targets to key sustainability measures, including reducing food waste. Tesco will be one of the first UK food retailers to do this.
This means that 25% of the Performance Share Plan awards Executive Directors receive will depend on Tesco’s progress on key sustainability measures including gender and ethnicity representation, carbon reduction and food waste reduction in its own operations.
For top executives, meeting these goals is worth tens of thousands of pounds or more in Tesco shares.
Tesco has already achieved a 45% reduction in food waste across its own operations against the 2016/17 baseline. However, the retailer knows there is still more to do despite just 0.35% of food it handled, last year, ending up as waste.
Ken Murphy, Tesco Group CEO, said: “While I’m proud of our progress in making sure good food doesn’t go to waste, we know there’s still more work to do. By accelerating our target to halve food waste in our operations by 2025 and aligning executive pay performance targets to this goal, we hope to drive further transformative change.
“However, the work we and our suppliers do won’t tackle the issue alone. We have long called for Government to introduce mandatory food waste reporting to help measure and judge if real action is happening. Action must be taken across the whole industry.”
