ALDI Portugal: focus on improving packaging and reducing food waste

Working on packaging optimisation and the reduction of food waste – just two priorities of ALDI Portugal.

Every day, we are dedicated to work on three key issues: climate, packaging, and food waste. We collaborate with all relevant departments and suppliers to achieve our goals, and continue our dialogue by joining initiatives such as the Portuguese Plastic Pact, United Against Food Waste (Unidos Contra o Desperdício), and the Roadmap for Decarbonisation of the Distribution Sector, a project operated by the Portuguese Association of Distribution Companies, which we joined in 2022.

In 2023, we continued our dialogue with national multi-stakeholder initiatives by joining the Business Council for Sustainable Development and act4nature Portugal. This established our position as a sustainability frontrunner in Portugal, and reinforced our pledge to address worldwide challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

Our International Packaging Strategy involves working to fulfil our international packaging targets at national level. We participate in internal workshops in Portugal to improve our packaging, reduce material, and increase recyclability and recycled content. The elimination of plastic interlayers in cheese packaging is one of the many examples of optimisation. This specific reduction in plastic results in a 30 per cent saving in plastic per unit, with an estimated annual plastic saving of 1.8 tonnes.

On the topic of animal welfare, we introduced the Welfair® certification for all fresh ALDI brand chicken meat in our standard assortment. We also continued to increase our sustainable certified fish and seafood product selection.

We sustained our partnership with the Portuguese Association for Combating Childhood Obesity (APCOI) to promote healthy eating among children and supported the AMI Foundation Ecoética project for the fourth consecutive year in 2023.