Sainsbury’s goes peat-free: Mushrooms that are good for you - and the planet!

We’re serving up innovation, one mushroom at a time

Ready for a fresh twist on your favourite mushrooms? At Sainsbury’s, we’re thrilled to announce a UK supermarket first: our core mushrooms are now peat-free. That means your stir-fries, omelettes and risottos just got even healthier for you and the planet.

But we’re not stopping at peat-free. We’re also shining some light (quite literally) on your shopping basket with Vitamin D enhanced white mushrooms. With 57 per cent of UK adults not getting enough of this essential sunshine vitamin, just 100g of our enriched mushrooms will help you hit your daily target. Add that to our already popular Vitamin D chestnut mushrooms (launched in 2018) and you’ve got the biggest range of Vitamin D-enriched mushrooms in any UK supermarket. That’s 170 million portions of sunshine-packed mushrooms hitting Sainsbury’s shelves each year.

Our fungi revolution is about more than just good nutrition. By ditching peat in our mushroom growing, we’re helping protect the UK’s precious peatlands: nature’s secret superheroes. As a natural carbon storer, peat plays a key role in regulating earth’s climate. Extracting peat to help grow products such as mushrooms is contributing to climate change and the destruction of wetland ecosystems, as carbon emissions are released during harvest and the peatlands can take decades, if not centuries, to recover. Peatlands also provide critical habitats for many rare, threatened or declining animal and plant species, while having a significant ability to retain water, and to improve both soil and water quality. With weather patterns becoming increasingly unpredictable due to climate change, peatlands’ ability to slow water flow can potentially help to reduce the risk of flooding.

Our mission to make a difference doesn’t stop with mushrooms. Earlier this year, we pulled off our biggest ever plastics reduction in mushroom punnets, saving over 775 tonnes of plastic annually. That’s a lot less plastic—and a lot more planet-friendly shopping.

We’re committed to becoming Net Zero across our own operations by 2035, and supply chain by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C.

The facts

• The UK government wants to restore 35,000 hectares of peatlands by 2025, we’re already helping support this goal with peat-free compost and bedding plants
• Retail accounts for 70 per cent of all peat sold in the UK, but we’re leading the charge with peat-free and reduced peat products
• Our latest plastic reduction on mushroom punnets saves over 775 tonnes of plastic every year. That’s the weight of about 5 blue whales!

So, next time you pick up a pack of Sainsbury’s mushrooms, you’re not just cooking up a tasty meal, you’re also supporting our work to reduce climate change too.