Sustainable Lifestyle

Preventing biodiversity loss

To ensure access to nature’s resources for future generations, we must preserve biodiversity, which is our heritage. To actively participate in the pursuit of the goals set out in the global forum, we implemented a Biodiversity Policy in 2023. The Policy sets out the general principles of conduct for the protection of biodiversity, and also indicates the main directions of activities in this area, aimed at ensuring the protection of ecosystems and preventing the loss of biodiversity including counteracting deforestation. The policy applies to both Żabka Polska and its franchisees, as well as the suppliers of own brands.

Our commitments have led us to take a closer look at our supply chain. Starting in 2023, we now only accept branded products with certified palm oil, further contributing to the preservation of rainforests and wildlife habitats. We have taken steps to improve animal welfare and promote sustainable sourcing in our own-brand products. We have removed cage-laid eggs from our offerings and implemented policies to regulate the commodities used in our products, ensuring sustainable sourcing for plant ingredients, fish and seafood.

Helping to transform the nutrition landscape

With Żabka research, carried out in 2020, showing that nearly 70% of Polish adults regularly buy ready-to-eat meals, we feel highly responsible for the quality of the diets consumed by the families of the 3 million people who shop in our stores every day.

This is what lay behind the Porcja DobreGO! nutrition programme, and the Spróbuj DobreGO! campaign, launched in early July 2023 and designed to help those customers with time and lifestyle constraints that can restrict their ability to make the right food choices for their health and the environment.

The overall programme was carefully designed to show consumers that healthy composition is not incompatible with delicious flavours. With the aim of meeting multiple different taste preferences and lifestyle needs across our private-label range – including Plant Hunter, Szamamm, Tomcio Paluch and Dobra Karma – it not only marked those foods with a high A or B Nutri-Score rating with a special Porcja DobreGO! label. It also provided users of the Żappka mobile app with a discount of more than 25% on those selected products.

This unique initiative not only ensured that shoppers had ever-better access instore to well-balanced ready-made meals and snacks, created under the guidance of a professional nutritionist, as we observed an 85% increase in sales of products with Nutri-Score A&B after launching the Spróbuj DobreGO! campaing. It also provided younger consumers with the opportunity to learn about healthy and balanced eating through playing the game Żabka Run: Porcja DobreGO! on the global online Roblox platform.

This first season of the game used innovation to encourage a lifelong healthy approach to food by teaching players how to use the Nutri-Score system in their everyday shopping and so understand the nutritional profile of ready meals.

Co-created with the Game Changer agency, and with influencers selected by BeLoud, the game required players who hit obstacles while playing to answer a question on good nutrition before they could start playing again. It also featured a futuristic version of a Żabka store as part of an environment in which players use jet backpacks to move, avoiding obstacles and buying items to make their gameplay easier.

According to Anna Grabowska, EVP, Managing Directorof Żabka International at Żabka Group, ‘Initiatives like the Porcja DobreGO! programme are designed to make life easier for our customers while restricting our negative impact on the environment. We are on the verge of a global nutritional transformation, and Żabka always aims to be where the needs of consumers are.’

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Targeting sustainable living: for everybody, all the time

We always aim to support our customers’ sustainable nutrition, ensuring that it’s good both for them and for the planet. To ensure this, we continuously implement a series of measures that are framed by our Animal Welfare Policy and our Policy of Sustainable Sourcing of Raw Vegetable Materials, Fish and Seafood.

At the beginning of 2022, we removed from sale eggs from cage-reared chickens. We decided to go a step further in 2023, by also eliminating their use as a main ingredient in our Own Brand products. We want laying hens whose eggs we sell and are used in our products to live in spaces that allow them to express their natural behaviours, and for their living conditions to be as close as possible to their natural environment. Cage rearing allows neither of these aims.

Our Animal Welfare Policy involves making changes to how farm animals are treated. We base our approach to humane treatment on the requirements of the ISO TS 34700:2016 standard, as expressed in the five ‘Freedom Principles’ included in our policy. We have decided to apply these principles to all Own Brand products that contain meats including poultry, beef and pork. These principles cover:

1. providing animals with access to water and a healthy diet
2. enabling a comfortable environment and resting place
3. caring for animal health, preventing pain and diseases
4. allowing the expression of natural behaviours, and
5. providing protection against fear and distress.

At Żabka, we are aware of the importance of the considerate treatment of animals. We want our customers to be certain when choosing Own Brand products that they come from sources that guarantee respect for animals. We are also aware that healthy and safe food can only come from healthy animals. This is why we have determined that all fish and seafood in our Own Brand products must have ASC/MSC/BAP certification, which guarantees their traceability and ensures they come from sources that are both sustainable and legal.

Our actions are not limited to animal-derived products. We are aware that plant-based products can also have a strong impact on ecosystems. We therefore eliminated palm oil from use in our Own Brand products in 2019, and in 2021 introduced a Sustainable Palm Oil Policy stating that all other products in our stores contain only RSPO-certified palm oil. Since 2023, all our Own Brand products containing coffee use raw materials covered by Rainforest Alliance 2020 certification.

We know that there is still much more we can do in this area. We plan to further extend our approach to cage-reared eggs, fully eradicating their use as derivative ingredients and semi-finished products in all our Own Brand products. We also aim to ensure over the same timeframe that the tea and cocoa used in our Own Brand products has Rainforest Alliance 2020 certification. Our ultimate aim is to create the conditions for sustainable living for everybody, every day.

We are repairing shoes within a partnership with woshwosh

Together with woshwosh, the first company in Europe focusing on shoe circularity and collaborating with local cobblers to revive this dying craft, we extend the lifespan of our customers’ shoes by several seasons, thereby collectively supporting the natural environment. Cleaning or repair services for footwear can be ordered in-store, through the website, or via the application. Customers can choose individual services or attractive cleaning and repair packages at competitive prices. Shoes should be brought to the selected Żabka store when ordering the service and collected from the same location.

Through this collaboration, we demonstrate our commitment to promoting the zero-waste concept and popularizing shoe cleaning and repair as alternatives to frequent new purchases. Cleaning and repairing shoes, compared to buying new ones, result in savings of up to 95 percent in CO2 emissions! By choosing the shoe cleaning service provided by Żabka and woshwosh instead of washing them in a washing machine, it is possible to reduce the carbon footprint by up to 93 percent! The production of one pair of shoes releases an average of 14 kg of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and consumes up to 50 liters of water. On average, a pair of shoes takes about 50 years to decompose. Less than 1 percent of discarded shoes are recycled.