Jo Gilbert hears from Luke Jones, ethics, sustainability performance & engagement manager at Waitrose, about regenerative agriculture, packaging innovation, premiumisation and why sustainability remains central to the long-term strategy

What does winning Sustainable Retailer of the Year at the Drinks Retailing Awards 2026 mean to you and to Waitrose?

It’s a fantastic recognition of our ongoing work to champion lower-impact producers, reduce packaging and make sustainable choices easier for shoppers.

As the only UK retailer with its own farm – the Leckford Estate in Hampshire, home to our Leckford Estate Brut sparkling wine – we don’t just talk about farming challenges; we live them. We understand the environmental pressures producers face from climate change and biodiversity loss, and how important it is to invest for a sustainable future.

What are the biggest sustainability priorities for Waitrose’s beer, wine & spirits team in 2026?

Our customers increasingly want to shop in line with their values, so our focus remains on helping them make more sustainable choices.

That stretches across the supply chain, from supporting responsible sourcing programmes to making progress against our science-based climate targets. We’re also expanding the Waitrose Foundation, which has raised more than £27m since 2005 to improve the lives of workers through community-led projects in our supply chain.

When customers buy a Waitrose Foundation product, including wines such as the No1 Cederberg range, 2% of sales goes back to the farm, where worker committees decide how to invest the money in their communities.

Packaging remains one of the biggest sustainability challenges in drinks. Where are you seeing the most progress?

Packaging is often the most carbon-intensive part of a drinks supply chain, but that also makes it one of the biggest opportunities for innovation.

We’re committed to reducing the average weight of our 75cl wine bottles to 420g by the end of 2026, working alongside the Sustainable Wine Roundtable. We’ve also shifted more wines from small glass bottles into cans, removing around 320 tonnes of glass from the supply chain annually.

Other initiatives include removing unnecessary neck sleeves and capsules from selected ranges, including Loved & Found. We’re also trialling cork collection schemes in stores to encourage recycling of the nearly 25 million natural corks purchased by our customers which end up in landfill each year.

Regenerative agriculture has become a major talking point. How is Waitrose approaching it?

We’re supporting regenerative agriculture through our Farming for Nature initiative, which is designed to help more than 2,000 British farmers transition towards nature-friendly farming practices, including those growing grapes and apples at our Leckford farm.

The programme aims to improve farm resilience, reduce flood risk, increase carbon sequestration and help tackle climate change. We see regenerative farming as having the potential to deliver real benefits for both the environment and long-term food production.

At our Leckford vineyard and orchard, we’ve been trialling regenerative practices and it became among the first sites certified by Regenified in 2024. We’ve also worked with the Sustainable Wine Roundtable to explore the role regenerative viticulture can play across the wider industry.

How do you balance sustainability ambitions with commercial pressures and value-conscious shoppers in the current retail climate?

We position ourselves as the Home of Food Lovers, offering responsibly sourced products across all price points. Our customers care about sustainability, but they also care about value. For us, value isn’t about being the cheapest; it’s about delivering quality, ethically sourced products at a fair price – what we call value with values.

We continue to invest in competitively priced essentials, while also developing premium own-label ranges and working with producers that share our sustainability ambitions. Ultimately, many of the cost pressures facing the food and drink system are linked to environmental challenges, so sustainability isn’t separate from affordability, it’s part of creating a resilient long-term food system.

Are customers actively seeking out sustainable drinks, or does sustainability work best when it is embedded more subtly into the retail experience?

Our priority is making sustainable choices easy. Some customers actively seek out information, while others trust us to have done the hard work for them.

Many sustainability improvements are deliberately subtle, such as packaging reductions or sourcing decisions that reduce impact without changing the customer experience. At the same time, we want to be transparent for shoppers who do want to understand more.

What’s particularly exciting about drinks is the role that provenance and producer stories play. Customers often spend more time considering drinks purchases than many other grocery categories, creating a valuable opportunity to engage them with sustainability.

Do shoppers associate environmental credentials with quality and premiumisation?

Yes, there is a growing overlap between sustainability and premiumisation, and our research shows customers often associate sustainability with quality.

However, there remains a gap between intention and behaviour. While many consumers say they are willing to pay more for sustainable products, purchasing decisions don’t always follow through, and there is increasing scepticism around sustainability claims.

Our job as a retailer is twofold: helping suppliers reduce their impact and giving customers clear information so they can make informed choices. A good example from another category is our recent introduction of welfare labelling in meat so customers can better understand the difference.

Looking ahead, what does the drinks industry still get wrong about sustainability and where do the biggest opportunities lie?

The industry still faces significant challenges around areas such as sustainable agriculture, human rights, packaging and water use. While progress has been made, continued collaboration and infrastructure investment are essential.

For example, drinks brands are doing incredible things in regenerative agriculture and this will be an increasingly important tool to protect and restore nature, improve climate resilience and reduce water and pesticide usage. Functional drinks is another area of rapid growth. These products reflect changing consumer priorities around health and wellbeing, and include options packed with such ingredients as electrolytes, adaptogenic plants and live cultures, which show that function is the new future in the category.

There is also huge potential in better storytelling. Drinks are uniquely positioned to connect consumers with the people, places and practices behind products, helping demonstrate how purchasing decisions can drive positive change.

I think the low & no category will continue to grow as a mainstream lifestyle choice that moves beyond being a token add-on to become a genuine lifestyle category. Lastly, I believe moving beyond reduction and recyclability into reuse and circularity will be truly transformational. The introduction of the Deposit Return Scheme in the UK will mean brands have more incentive than ever to innovate in packaging.