Sustainability

Climate change is a significant environmental, social and economic challenge facing the global community. As one of Australia’s largest companies, we want to help create a more sustainable future. We are acting now, working towards reducing our own operational emissions¹ and engaging with stakeholders across our value chain to support them to lower their emissions and build their resilience against climate change impacts.

Waste

We understand our customers are concerned about waste, including food waste, and its associated environmental impacts. As one of Australia’s largest companies, we have the necessary scale to meaningfully reduce waste across our value chain, in collaboration with our industry partners, suppliers, producers and customers. Given waste contributes to Coles’ total emissions footprint, waste reduction activities are also important in the context of our efforts to decarbonise.

Packaging plays an essential role in protecting products during transportation, extending product life, keeping food safe and reducing food waste. When not managed responsibly, however, packaging can end up in landfill or polluting our natural environment, oceans and waterways, negatively impacting wildlife. For this reason, it is important to Coles, our customers, and other stakeholders that we reduce unnecessary packaging, incorporate post-consumer recycled content where possible and design packaging that is easy to recycle.

We recognise that we only succeed together with our team, community and suppliers. With more than 115,000 team members at around 2,500 locations around Australia, our people are the key to our success. We aim to provide all our team members with an inclusive and safe environment, and a great career at Coles.

We believe we can build stronger communities when we work together to make a positive difference and support each other in times of need. Aligned with our purpose of helping Australians to eat and live better every day, we support many charities and community organisations across Australia through partnerships, fundraising, food donations and disaster relief.

We care about how the food we sell is produced and sourced. We want to work together with our supplier partners and are committed to building strong, multigenerational, collaborative relationships with Australian farmers and producers, while looking after the welfare of animals. Our responsible sourcing initiatives focus on safeguarding animal welfare and minimising environmental impact.

To deliver on our purpose of ‘helping Australians eat and live better every day’ we want to make it easy and affordable for our customers to make healthy food and drink choices while shopping at Coles. We are also focused on providing products that are of the highest quality and comply with national safety standards and regulations.

Coles respects human rights and opposes slavery in all its forms. We are committed to reducing the potential for labour and human rights issues in our own operations and in our supply chains. Our aim is to ensure human rights are understood, respected and upheld.