Questionnaire on Sustainable food value chains of European supermarkets

The questions below aim to explore your company’s orientation towards sustainability as well as your supply chain management practices, particularly with regards to your store brand food and drink products. Please note that the total of 25 questions aim at exploring your baseline practices, not just your best practices. The questionnaire is estimated to take around one hour to complete, excluding the time required to gather any additional data or documentation. Please note that you may attach any relevant document to support your answer(s) below each question when required. You do not need to answer everything at once you have the option to save the incomplete questionnaire at any time and finish it at a later date. For any questions please contact us at supplychainge@scp-centre.org.

The information gathered from this questionnaire will be entered into a transparency database to be used by various stakeholders for comparing the sustainability performance of main retailers throughout Europe. It will be used as the main input for this database along with other secondary data in later stages as well. Therefore, we welcome every response and encourage you to answer all questions as accurately as possible. The database also aims to recognize those retailers with a high level of information and transparency. Please provide any further information or documentation (weblink, policies, external rating etc.) to support your answers. All documentation supplied will be regarded as for public distribution, unless otherwise specified, then will be used only by the research team to verify claims.

We welcome all of your constructive comments and feedback, and are available to contact. The questionnaire and database are part of the European Commission funded SUPPLY CHA!NGE project. We would like to keep you informed and involved in further business engagement activities of the project and to collaborate together in the future. For further information regarding the SUPPLY CHA!NGE project and its events, particularly the Business Forum held in Milan in October 2015, please see the websites below.

About project: http://supplychainge.org
Business Forum: http://supplychainge.org/the-business-forum

Key Terms

Store brand: Store brands refer to retailers’ own private label(s) (also called own brands or private brands), which they manage directly and have the full responsibility of control such as, inter alia, development and sourcing. This can include economy, mid-range or premium pricing concepts, as well as brand names that do not refer to the retailer’s name. They may be available in different retail concepts from a retail group. These can be sourced fully from third party producers or involve higher levels of ownership or integration of supply chain.
Company buyers: Company buyers refers to those intermediary individuals employed by a retailer in charge of selecting products to be stocked and sold in a given retailer supermarket chain.
Suppliers: Suppliers refers to those actors along the food supply chains that a retailer has direct relationships with. 
Producers: Producers refers to those actors further down the food supply chain, usually at the primary stage of agriculture or food preparation. In most cases, they do not have direct relationships with the retailer. However, when a retailer purchases directly from producers, those producers are also considered suppliers.


Disclaimer: This questionnaire has been produced with the assistance of the European Union within the project ‘SUPPLY CHA!NGE Make Supermarkets Fair’. The contents of this questionnaire are the sole responsibility of the SUPPLY CHA!NGE consortium and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union.