How Germany’s Biggest Supermarkets Score on Sustainability—and Where They Fall Short

Germany’s eight largest food retailers talk a good game on sustainability, but a new scientific assessment reveals a striking gap between what these companies promise and what they actually deliver. In the first systematic, company-by-company evaluation of its kind, researchers found that the supermarket giants performed far better at writing strategies and publishing reports than at implementing measures that would genuinely reduce the environmental damage of the food system they control.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainability, was led by scientists at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) in Switzerland together with partners at Justus Liebig University Giessen and the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA). The team developed a generic framework for comparing the sustainability performance of large food retailers and then applied it in a pilot assessment of the environmental dimension in Germany, using 2020 as the reference year. The results paint a picture of an industry that has embraced the language of sustainability while leaving much of its transformative potential untapped.

The scale of the retail sector’s influence explains why the researchers focused on supermarkets rather than farms or factories. According to a sector inquiry by the German Federal Cartel Office, food retailers account for between 65 and 90 percent of manufacturers’ total sales, depending on the procurement market, and roughly three-quarters of consumers’ monthly household food spending flows through retail outlets. In Germany, the eight food retailers with the highest revenues—belonging to just four corporations—generated more than 75 percent of total food retail revenues in 2022. Vertical integration and the expansion of private-label brands give these companies direct leverage over product specifications and supply chains that few other actors in the food system can match.

To capture this leverage systematically, the researchers structured their framework around four spheres of influence that any large retailer can exercise regardless of the sustainability issue at stake. First, companies can reduce impacts within their own organizations through building insulation, refrigeration technology, logistics, waste management, and staff training. Second, they can shape upstream supply chains through procurement requirements, product specifications, and third-party certification standards. Third, they can influence consumer choices through assortment, store and shelf design, advertising, and pricing. Fourth, as major economic actors, they can engage with the policy framework within which the entire sector operates.

The methodological architecture of the assessment is what distinguishes it from previous benchmarking exercises. Existing approaches—life-cycle assessment, the FAO’s SAFA Guidelines, the World Benchmarking Alliance rankings, WWF rating schemes, and ESG reporting frameworks—each capture parts of the picture but differ markedly in scope, data sources, and how they treat retailers’ influence over suppliers, consumers, and policy. The new framework instead adopts an action-oriented structure: rather than trying to measure environmental outcomes directly, which is complicated by data gaps and the notorious difficulty of allocating impacts across co-products in agriculture, it evaluates how thoroughly companies use the levers actually available to them. Each field of action is assessed through indicators scored on a scale from 1, meaning no practice, to 5, meaning best practice.

In the German pilot, the team operationalised 22 fields of action, 43 indicators, and 112 sub-indicators across the supply chain, own sites, and consumption spheres, covering four environmental categories: climate, soil, biodiversity including deforestation, and oceans. Data collection proceeded in two stages. Questionnaires were first pre-filled with publicly available information from sustainability reports and press releases, then sent to the companies for correction and supplementation. Indicator weights were derived from nine independent expert judgements using the Best-Worst Method, a technique chosen because it requires fewer pairwise comparisons than the widely used Analytical Hierarchy Process while providing a built-in consistency check. Sensitivity analyses tested whether the company rankings would hold under alternative weighting schemes—and they largely did.

The findings reveal a consistent pattern across all three spheres of influence. In the supply chain, companies scored on average between no practice and average practice, with communication-related performance stronger than strategy, which in turn outpaced implementation. The lowest scores appeared precisely where substantive change happens: in measures for sustainable product-range design, such as traceability systems, increasing the share of certified products, and strengthening procurement guidelines, which were on average only partially implemented. Several corporate targets failed to meet the SMART criteria—specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-bound—undermining their usefulness as management tools.

At companies’ own sites, the same hierarchy repeated itself, and some gaps were particularly stark. None of the eight retailers could provide quantitative information on reductions in food waste at its own locations. Issues such as sustainable investment criteria for occupational pension schemes had not yet been integrated into corporate strategies. The researchers noted that external regulatory and economic pressures, including refrigeration requirements and energy-efficiency rules, created clear incentives for change, whereas the scope for differentiation through purely voluntary measures appeared comparatively limited. In the consumption sphere, all companies ran environmental or awareness campaigns, but information on investment levels, duration, and reach was too incomplete for systematic comparison, and certified or plant-based products remained a small share of most relevant assortments.

Across environmental categories, climate dominated corporate attention, with most companies seeking to derive targets from scientific evidence through initiatives such as the Science Based Targets initiative. Deforestation was addressed by all companies, while biodiversity featured in the strategies of only a subset, and soil received comparatively little attention at either the strategic or implementation level. Interestingly, discounters such as ALDI SÜD, ALDI Nord, and Lidl performed better in the supply-chain sphere, plausibly because their higher private-label shares give them more direct control over raw-material procurement, while full-range retailers matched or exceeded them in consumer-facing activities. No company demonstrated consistently leading performance across all fields.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns the economics of sustainability. Many of the measures retailers had implemented aligned with direct business benefits—energy savings, premium product revenues, reputational gains—while measures that could conflict with short-term commercial interests were rare, even where they could contribute substantially to environmental objectives. Limiting advertising for animal products or off-season goods, for example, was largely absent. The authors argue that fields where all companies perform poorly may reflect structural constraints that individual firms cannot resolve alone, pointing toward a role for policy: internalizing external costs, setting minimum supply-chain standards, and eliminating particularly harmful practices such as air-freighted food. The framework itself, the researchers emphasize, is transferable in structure even though the German scores are not, and a follow-up assessment using 2023 data has already extended the approach to social responsibility and animal welfare—evidence that transparent, repeatable benchmarking can become a standing instrument for holding the food system’s most powerful gatekeepers to account.

Subject of Research: A generic framework for comparative sustainability assessment of large food retailers, piloted on the environmental performance of Germany's eight biggest grocery companies

Article Title: Assessing the sustainability performance of large food retail companies: a generic framework and pilot application to the environmental dimension in Germany

Article References: Schader, C., Keller, O., Teriete, M., Sander, M., Schafhausen, C., Herzig, C., & Seo, H. (2026). Assessing the sustainability performance of large food retail companies: a generic framework and pilot application to the environmental dimension in Germany. Frontiers in Sustainability, 7, Article 1720594. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1720594

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsus.2026.1720594

Keywords: food retail, sustainability assessment, environmental performance, Germany, supermarkets, supply chain, benchmarking, indicators, food systems, corporate sustainability, planetary boundaries, sustainable consumption