How we choose our suppliers
At Sainsbury’s we understand that the only way we can provide our customers with outstanding products is by having outstanding suppliers - and for over 100 years we’ve been working hard on our relationship with such suppliers.
We currently source our own-brand ranges of foods, non-food and household goods from more than 15,000 direct suppliers, farmers and growers. With a challenge of this scale, we need to make sure everyone understands what Sainsbury’s expects, and that there are clear systems to check each element in the supply chain. Our technical requirements are recognised as amongst the most rigorous in the industry, designed to ensure our products consistently meet stringent quality and safety standards.
We take no chances in ensuring our customers get healthy, safe food, cleaning and other household products for you and your family. Before any supplier is taken on, we independently assess their ability to meet our in-depth requirements; if they’re unable to operate to our standards, we’re simply not interested.
When a supplier is approved, we continually monitor their performance against agreed quality and safety parameters, and regularly inspect them to make sure agreed controls are being applied in practice. A significant proportion of our inspections are carried out without any prior notice to keep everyone on their toes, so the standards we find when we’re not expected are exactly the same as when we are.
What’s more, in the quest for continuous improvement we set all our approved suppliers new challenging targets, and make further assessments on these results.
We pride ourselves on providing outstanding products, and clearly achieving these standards does not happen by chance.
