Blog

Water for All: Dialling up collaboration

Since World Water Day in 2018, we have seen another year of extreme weather events, from large parts of Europe experiencing exceptional heat and drought through the summer of 2018 to Kerala suffering its worst flooding since the 1920s. Aside from shorter...

Think global but #showthelove locally

We all love different things. Dogs or cats, the great outdoors or vibrant cities, curry or fish & chips. That’s what makes us unique and the world so interesting. As a business with over 80,000 colleagues, millions of customers and serving hundreds...

Celebrating IWD: M&S Joins Better Than Cash Alliance

There’s no normal day working as the Global Ethical Trade Manager at M&S. On Monday I might be in Cambodia meeting a programme delivery partner, by Friday I’m back in London running a compliance report on a proposed new supplier or co-ordinating...

12 take outs from M&S Responsible Recruitment week

What a great week M&S and our suppliers have spent exploring responsible recruitment with a fantastic seeing is believing visit to G’s, a responsible recruitment toolkit webinar, 5 guest blogs and a public event. This has helped to build best...

A transparent cuppa – mapping our tea and coffee supply chains

As we enter the second week of Fairtrade Fortnight, it’s a time to celebrate our Fairtrade products and reflect on our hard work building strong relationships with our producers and working on programmes such as empowering women in the supply chain....

Global Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare: proud to be recognised again for our leading approach to farm animal welfare

Marks & Spencer is committed to offering a wide range of high-quality delicious food with provenance that you can depend upon. We know that good food starts at the farm, which is why we work with M&S Select Farmers that we know and trust.One of...

Responsible Recruitment Week: Why scaling responsible recruitment is vital to tackling food labour shortages and preventing modern slavery

In most of my discussions with suppliers concerns about finding labour is high on the agenda. In the UK the number of EU workers has been declining year on year, according to National Farmers Union last year shortages of seasonal workers hit almost 30%...

Plastic Hackathon: We’ll go faster and further together

As a packaging technologist, I could tell you a thing or two about the plastic pollution challenges in retail and as a father of three young girls I also feel compelled to make a difference in helping to fix the issue. I’m also a lifelong Aston...

Sparks Customers Raise £5 million for Charity – all through swiping their Sparks card!

A few years ago, we launched our Sparks members programme to reward loyal customers and offer a more personalised shopping experience at M&S. With the customer being at the heart of everything we do, we were determined to go beyond offering incentives...

Our Plastics Plan: What we’ve achieved in the first four months

In September, we outlined how we were step changing our approach to using plastic and we shared an update on our progress before Christmas on our blog. Four months on, here’s our highlight achievements:   Reducing our plastic useMaking our...

Collaboration is key to achieving responsible chemical management

Chemicals are used at almost every stage of the manufacturing process for clothing and footwear, from the production of raw materials like growing cotton with pesticides and fabric dyeing, to the addition of protection benefits such as water repellency....

Over five million meals dished out to communities through M&S redistribution scheme

At M&S, we believe our food is just too good to be wasted, especially when over 1.2 million people in the UK have limited access to fresh food at affordable prices. So we want to play our part in providing meals for local communities while reducing...