Meena Bazar has removed single-use plastic from 71% of its own-brand packaging in eighteen months, and has a dated commitment to finish the job by the end of 2027.
The easy part was the carrier bag. The hard part is everything behind it: the shrink wrap on a pallet of rice, the tray under a chicken, the film over a punnet of tomatoes, the sachet a spice blend arrives in. Roughly nine tenths of the plastic that passes through a grocery chain is never seen by the shopper.
Working backwards from the shelf
The retail team audited every own-brand line and sorted it into three groups: packaging we can drop entirely, packaging we can substitute now, and packaging where no compliant alternative exists yet. The first group went immediately. The second — jute and paper for dry goods, moulded pulp for produce, glass for the wet range — took a year of supplier work and a tolerated cost increase of about four per cent.
Responsible business is profitable business, but not on day one. The four per cent is real. We took it because the alternative was to keep pretending the problem belonged to someone else.
The third group is where the honest reporting matters. Chilled meat and some dairy lines still have no packaging that meets food-safety law without plastic. Those lines are listed by name in the annual disclosure rather than averaged into a headline percentage.
The numbers so far
- 71% of own-brand lines converted away from single-use plastic.
- 340 tonnes of plastic taken out of the supply chain across the twelve months to June.
- 26 outlets now running in-store collection points for packaging returned by customers.
- 2027 — the year the remaining lines must be converted or delisted.
None of this works without the suppliers. Forty-eight of them have re-tooled in some way to stay on the shelf, and the group has held its buying prices for those who did. The work is audited as part of the group's annual sustainability disclosure, and the years we miss a target are published alongside the years we meet one.