Today was special at Asda House! Not only was Doug McMillon, CEO & President of Walmart International, visiting but so did the Prime Minister, David Cameron. David spent quite a while with us answering colleagues’ questions and it was a real treat to have him in Asda House.

For me though the highlight was Doug. He praised us for all the work that we have done and continue to do on sustainability. Indeed he held up Asda as a leader within Walmart for what we do on sustainability.

I wanted to publicly pass my thanks on to my team and also to everyone involved in sustainability all around Asda, whether in energy, packaging, waste, transport, products or any of the other areas of activity. Well done team!

Doug’s final words to all of us was to ‘Go Big and Go Faster’ – we certainly will so watch this space!

One of the major challenges of our Sustainability 2.0 strategy is that many of the targets are out of our direct control, especially concerning products and their supply chains. However the potential ‘wins’ for both our customers and our suppliers are considerable so we have been looking at innovative ways to engage.

The key word in delivering these targets is ‘collaboration’. This is not about Asda demanding things from our suppliers but about us working with them to help them become more sustainable and so deliver on our customers’ expectations they told us in our Green Is Normal Study

The benefits to our suppliers are many – efficiency, reduced costs, fulfilling customer demand, reduced risk from future regulation, simply ‘doing the right thing’ and closer working with us. However unlocking this collaboration is not as simple as it sounds.

As a major step forwards we will this week launch the Asda Sustain & Save Exchange. This is an online collaboration space hosted by 2 Degrees, the global community for sustainable business and brings together over 70 of our top fresh food suppliers across meat, produce and bakery. The target is to reduce these suppliers’ environmental impacts in their water, energy & waste usage.

This project comes from the top of Asda and is sponsored by Barry Williams, Asda’s Fresh Food Commercial Director – its his video at the top of the blog. We also have support from the Food & Grocery Experts at the Institute of Grocery Distribution. See here what Toby has to say.

I’m running the project but also on board we have fellow bloggers Paul Dover and Chris Brown. I’ll bring you an update after the official launch this week and as the project develops. If you’re one of our fresh suppliers and think you should be involved, drop me a line.