Happier World

We champion the role our Partnership can play in advancing the happiness of the communities we work with and the wellbeing of society.

We build trusted business relationships, acting with integrity and doing what’s right. We take responsibility for our impact on the planet and work tirelessly to protect and restore nature, creating a more sustainable future for generations to come.

Protecting our natural world

Everything we do across our two brands, John Lewis and Waitrose, depends on and has an impact on nature, from the cultivation of land to produce food, and the use of raw materials to create furniture, clothes and technology, through to the running of our operations.

Taking responsibility for our impact on the planet is central to our Purpose and our strategy, which is highlighted in our latest Ethics and Sustainability 2021/22 report.

Watch our Partners share some of the key highlights from the report in the film below, or read it here. #purpose #sustainability

Helping our local communities

Our Founder established the Partnership to be a force for good in society, to make a difference to people’s lives and create positive social change. Those same values are alive and well today.

We continue to invest in our communities to create opportunities that promote a fairer and more inclusive society, working with leading charity partners including FareShare and Home-Start UK. This may be via monetary donations, as gifts ‘in kind’, through strategic relationships with charities that resonate with our brands and customers, or through our Partner volunteering hours and active engagement with local communities. 

We are proud of the relationships we have in our shops with local charities and community organisations, strengthened by our local network of Community Leads and Community Liaison Coordinators.

Driving sustainable action

It’s not just our business that is trying to lead sustainable innovation, it’s our Partners too. Take our Waitrose St Katharine’s Dock team for example. They enthusiastically welcomed a fleet of new wirelessly charged electric vehicles into their store to trial.

The vans have already proved a big hit with them as well as our customers, and will help us on our journey to eliminating fossil fuel use by 2030. We estimate this will save 70,000 tonnes of Co2 every year. By the same year we’ll have electrified all our cars, vans and light trucks and for heavier long distance trucks, half are already running on biomethane and all will be by 2028. There’s more to do but these are huge steps to achieving our net zero goals.

Farming with Nature

We are proud to be ‘Working in Partnership for a happier world’, doing all we can to improve the wellbeing of society and to protect and restore nature so we can help create a more sustainable future for generations to come. 

That’s why we have dedicated our Waitrose & Partners Leckford Estate Farm to regenerative farming practices. Since 2021 we have been recognised as LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming) Beacon of Excellence in Regenerative Agriculture, and over the next 15 years our Leckford Estate Farm will become a test bed for practices that prioritises farming with nature. 

We will channel our resources into embracing regenerative agriculture principals, with the aim of encouraging the industry to adopt these practices, in support of global net zero ambitions. We will not only focus on reducing carbon emissions but also building resilience against disease, pests and poor soil quality. 

We'll use what we learn to identify the farming techniques that manage land most effectively with an aim to reduce reliance on chemicals, artificial processes and fossil fuels. Tracking our progress with experts so we can create clear benchmarks and goals. And we'll share this knowledge with our farmers, suppliers and interested parties throughout the agriculture and retail industries, to elevate regeneration and conservation from a nice-to-have to an essential everyday farming practice. By investing in these initiatives and exchanging insights with farmers in our supply base will help us to deliver on our 2035 carbon net zero commitment.

Being kinder to our animals

At Waitrose, we’ve pioneered higher animal welfare standards for decades but we wanted to go even further. That’s why we partnered with Scotland’s Rural College to create a revolutionary new app to help us assess the emotional wellbeing of our farm animals. 

The first of its kind, the app aims to manage and improve opportunities that animals have to experience a good and enriching life. Specifically, it was designed to help our welfare assessors better understand, recognise and record emotionally expressive behaviour that, in part, contribute to an animal’s quality of life.

To some, it may sound too good to be true but the app has since earned industry recognition - recently winning the coveted  “Farming for the Future” category at the BBC Food & Farming Awards. Having already applied the technology to a number of livestock supply chains, we are now looking at other areas where we can apply the app and hope the process will lead to even further improvements to animal welfare standards across the UK.

Eradicating waste from design

Last year we launched our Circular Future Fund The Million Pound Challenge in partnership with Hubbub, an award winning environmental organisation. We asked applicants to find creative and innovative solutions to our throwaway culture of 'make - take - dispose' with the aim of discovering fresh ideas to encourage ways to 'repair, reuse or recycle'.

After 245 applications and 8 finalists, we picked 4 winners including a designer of expandable children’s shoes to an innovative polyester recycling technology, each one awarded a portion of a £1m pot to invest into further developing their ideas.

Read more about the winners 

Finding more ways to reuse preloved items

We’re always looking at innovative ways to recycle or upcycle preloved goods to help the environment, not to mention that help our customers manage their purse strings. And recently, we found a way to do both through our partnership with thelittleloop - the UK’s first rental marketplace for kids clothing.

Rather than purchasing clothes, parents can rent them out instead - exchanging with larger clothes when their kids inevitably outgrow them - helping make rental an everyday lifestyle choice, rather than just a one off occasional experience.

As a purpose-led brand with sustainability deeply rooted in our DNA. We’re always looking for new innovative initiatives and solutions to improve the sustainability of our products and services and our partnership with thelittleloop is one of the ways we’re delivering on our mission to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of our textile supply chains by 50% by 2030.

To find out more on all our sustainability goals, please read our latest Ethics & Sustainability report.