Morrisons’ double materiality assessment
Morrisons is one of the UK’s largest supermarket retailers, with a vertically integrated business model spanning farming partnerships, food manufacturing, logistics, retail stores and online services. The business has an established sustainability strategy and has undertaken significant work in recent years to strengthen and refresh its approach.
To build on this progress and ensure continued alignment with evolving stakeholder and regulatory expectations, Morrisons undertook a robust double materiality assessment (DMA) to develop a clear, structured understanding of the sustainability topics most significant to the business, its stakeholders and its value chain. The objective was to ensure that sustainability priorities were clearly evidenced, strategically focused and defensible.
While Morrisons is not currently required to undertake formal double materiality reporting, completing a double materiality assessment is increasingly recognised as best practice. It provides a robust foundation for sustainability strategy, governance and future reporting, and supports alignment with emerging regulatory and stakeholder expectations, while enhancing transparency across the value chain.
Morrisons partnered with Simply Sustainable between June 2025 and January 2026 to deliver a comprehensive DMA, designed to be proportionate to the business and grounded in evidence and stakeholder insight.
Impacts and benefits
- Clear prioritisation of sustainability topics: Identified six sustainability topics as material, providing clarity on the issues of greatest significance to Morrisons across both impact and financial perspectives.
- Stakeholder-informed insights: Engaged 128 internal and external stakeholders through surveys, interviews and focus groups, capturing perspectives from colleagues, suppliers, farmers, NGOs, investors and customers.
- Value chain-led analysis: Developed a detailed understanding of Morrisons’ upstream, own operations and downstream activities to inform the identification and assessment of sustainability-related impacts, risks and opportunities.
- Strengthened existing strategy and governance: Validated and refined Morrisons’ established sustainability priorities, enhancing governance oversight and supporting more robust and consistent reporting.
- Alignment with existing risk processes: Assessed financial risks and opportunities using Morrisons’ established enterprise risk methodology, ensuring consistency with existing risk management and decision-making.
The double materiality assessment has given us a clear, structured understanding of the sustainability topics most significant to Morrisons and our value chain. The outcomes provide a strong evidence base to support governance, prioritisation and future sustainability planning.”Rebecca Cranshaw Sustainability Manager, Morissons
The story
Between June 2025 and January 2026, Simply Sustainable delivered a comprehensive double materiality assessment for Morrisons, following a structured, six-step process aligned with recognised best practice, including the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).
The assessment began with developing a detailed understanding of Morrisons’ business model and value chain. This included reviewing internal and public documentation and undertaking a value chain mapping exercise, supported by a workshop with Morrisons’ sustainability team, to validate key activities across upstream suppliers, own operations and downstream impacts. This value chain view underpinned the identification of sustainability-related impacts, risks and opportunities.
A tailored list of sustainability topics was then developed, informed by relevant sustainability standards, peer benchmarking and the realities of the UK food retail sector. For each topic, potential positive and negative impacts, as well as associated risks and opportunities, were identified across the value chain.
Stakeholder engagement played a central role in the process. Insights were gathered through online surveys, plus interviews and focus groups with internal and external stakeholders. This engagement helped validate topic relevance, surface key concerns and opportunities, and inform the assessment of significance.
Each sustainability topic was assessed through two complementary lenses. Impact materiality considered how Morrisons’ activities affect people and the environment, including actual and potential impacts across the value chain. Financial materiality considered how sustainability-related risks and opportunities could influence Morrisons’ financial performance and resilience, using the company’s existing enterprise risk scoring methodology and reflecting the effectiveness of current controls.
The results of these assessments were reviewed and refined with Morrisons, materiality thresholds were agreed, and the outcomes were consolidated into a double materiality matrix. Each material topic is supported by clear rationales, drawing on stakeholder input, data and structured scoring.
Final outputs included a comprehensive double materiality report, a detailed register of impacts, risks and opportunities, stakeholder insights analysis and practical recommendations to support next steps.
Outcome
The double materiality assessment has provided Morrisons with a clear, evidence-based understanding of the sustainability topics that are most significant to the business, its stakeholders and its value chain.
It has enabled sustainability priorities to be validated through a structured assessment of impacts, risks and opportunities, aligned with Morrisons’ existing strategy, governance and enterprise risk processes. This can therefore support with consistent decision-making, transparent reporting and effective board oversight.
The assessment also provides greater clarity for prioritisation, helping to direct focus and resource towards the sustainability issues most relevant to long-term business resilience, risk management and value creation.
Importantly, it establishes a structured baseline that Morrisons can revisit and refresh over time, ensuring continued alignment as stakeholder expectations and the regulatory landscape evolve.
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