This metric is part of Eticonsum's research study on the evaluation of companies in the Retail Food sector on environmental, social and ethical issues.
Eticonsum is a non-profit market research agency specialising in ESG (environment, social, governance) corporate performance applied to consumer insights.
We research and analyse the ethical market in the FMCG sector and evaluate the environmental and social performance of companies in order to help both conscious consumers to decide according to their values and companies to compete on ethical reputation.

With this metric, we aim to provide insight into and compare the actions and policies of the main distributors in Spain regarding the distribution and promotion of organic products and the level of pesticide residues and sustainable origin of their fruit and vegetables.

The organic products business is worth 1,000 million euros in Spain, with year-on-year growth of 25%, thanks mainly to fruit, vegetables, vegetable drinks and eggs.
Lidl is the chain with the best sales success in organic products with the highest share of the organic market, specifically 16.5 points, according to 2018 data from the consultancy firm Kantar Worldpanel. It is followed by Carrefour (14.7 points) and Aldi (12.4 points).

There is a certain consensus that organic products generally offer many more guarantees than conventional products and are therefore, a priori, a better option for both the environment and health.
In this sense, in this metric we focus on eco-certifications as an element of objective measurement and comparability, although we also include other accreditations of environmental guarantees for fruit and vegetables, as well as pesticide requirements.

In any case, we must make it clear that the BIO certifications do not accredit the origin of the product, so we can find ingruences such as in those organic products grown in Asia or America, packaged in another EU country and sold in Spain (e.g. organic packaged rice, grown in India and packaged in Italy).
If we add to this the fact that organic products are often over-packaged and that they do not always respect natural cycles and seasonality, we come to the conclusion that buying organic in these cases is "worse the cure than the disease".

The ideal situation in this sense would be for the chains to include an offer of organic products, but with environmental coherence and not only because of the boom in demand in this niche, that the production, processing and packaging has been carried out in Spain, especially in those cases in which the raw material/product is available in our territory without having to resort to foreign countries. In this case, the EU label must include "Agricultura Espa?a" above "Agricultura UE" and above all above "Agricultura no UE".
Spain is the main organic producer in Europe and the fifth in the world, and a large part of the production is exported, so there is no excuse for not offering national organic products.

Therefore, organic products (ecological, organic,...) YES, but local, as "naked" as possible (without packaging) and seasonal, respecting the natural cycles of cultivation