Tesco commissions Anthesis Group to develop online sustainability community

Tesco has appointed Anthesis Group to develop and manage a single online sustainability community spanning the retailer’s supply-base.

The Tesco Supplier Network will help Tesco, suppliers and producers to drive sustainability across their businesses by fostering collaboration and innovation amongst suppliers and producers.

The new site will help 5000 members to interact directly with other suppliers, producers and Tesco, sharing the challenges and opportunities of delivering sustainable goods and services to the UK’s largest retailer. The Tesco Supplier Network will bring together the existing supplier networks; the Tesco Producer Network, which serves fresh food producers, and the Tesco Knowledge Hub, which serves branded manufacturing and processing suppliers.

Anthesis is providing a bespoke software solution to integrate the existing networks and improve their functionality. It has also convened a network of experts in product and supply-chain sustainability to advise site members. Six specialist community managers from Tesco and Anthesis will work behind the scenes to identify new case studies and link members together to solve challenges and find lasting solutions, through webinars, discussion forums, videos, surveys, e-learning modules and social media feeds.

Members will be able to connect directly to Tesco teams, learn more about Tesco’s strategy and find peers facing similar sustainability challenges at different product lifecycle stages, or on issues such as energy or food waste. The site will also help members to harness shared buying power and innovation resources.

The Tesco Supplier Network is set to launch in January 2015. Commenting on the new project, Anthesis CEO Stuart McLachlan said: “We’re excited to be working with Tesco on such a fantastic project, and delighted to be bringing such a diverse skill set to the table – from industry and issue expertise, to communications and software and systems capability. The new supplier network will bring much-needed scale to many of the sustainability challenges facing modern business, and we look forward to identifying and developing practical solutions to many of the supply-base challenges through this new community.”