Best Retailer Innovation &
Best Retailer Award 2022

The Best Retailer Innovation Award went to Waitrose & Partners for developing the first Qualitative Behavioural Assessment App to measure the emotional wellbeing of animals in the drive to continually improve their quality of life.

Working in conjunction with Scotland’s Rural College team led by Professor Francoise Wemelsfelder, this pioneering app assesses ‘how’ animals behave (for example are they happy/active or flat/stressed), and is being rolled out across their entire supply chain.

Waitrose applies a ‘Good Quality of Life’ approach to the animals within its supply chain, measuring and improving key outcomes of good housing, good feeding, good health, appropriate behaviour, and positive mental state. The first three areas have been easy to measure and understand for some time, but the last two have proven much more difficult to measure, interpret and assess. The QBA app has transformed this, and Waitrose can now monitor the mental well-being of all the animals in their supply chain. Once fully tested by Waitrose, the QBA App will be made accessible to other companies for the future benefit of all animals.

Waitrose’s constant aspiration to be the best and to do what is right for animals and for their customers makes them true leaders in farm animal welfare and this year they also received the overall Best Retailer Award for achieving the highest score in the 2022 Supermarket Survey

We are delighted to have once again received these awards, particularly to have held onto our status as a leading supermarket in animal welfare since 2004 and winner of the Best Retailer Award four consecutive times in a row.

It takes enormous passion, commitment and hard work to achieve the high standards we've maintained for the past 30 years. This is unquestionably a direct result of the longstanding and close relationships we've built with our farmers over multiple decades and without their loyalty and dedication, these accolades would simply not be possible.

Jake Pickering, Senior Agriculture Manager, Waitrose & Partners

Compassion celebrates 2022 award winners