Lidl recently announced a big UK expansion plan backed by a £600 million investment. But the move is joined with a cautious outlook, signalling a broader shift in how retailers and the wider food sector considers resilience.
As Lidl expands its British estate, it has been working with Risilience – a company that is helping businesses to quantify, plan, and act on the financial impacts of climate risks – to assess risks across its estate and development pipeline.
In other words, the retailer has been examining how extreme weather events such as flooding could disrupt store operations and future site development.
Risilience, which is a University of Cambridge spin-out, provides this insight through a combination of data models and digital twin technology. This data shows the way in which risk will change as climate change progresses – including the likelihood of weather-related incidents, as well as the costs of insurance premiums and greenhouse gas taxes across the globe.
Risk strategies have evolved
Dr Andrew Coburn, CEO and co-founder of Risilience, says the partnership between the firm and Lidl is an indicator of how forecast planning and risk is evolving.
“Most [F&B] businesses in general have a three-year or a five-year plan; so they’re relatively short term in their financial outlooks. But increasingly, we’re seeing businesses take a longer-term view of their own sustainability or business resilience,” Coburn noted.
And while chatter around sustainability appears to have quietened recently, he said it’s not a sign of dismissal.
“Early on many companies created roles such as chief sustainability officers and teams of sustainability people who sat outside business units. Over the last few years, these initiatives have been built into processes and some sustainability teams disbanded or absorbed into the business, typically the finance or risk office.”
Sustainability has become less isolated and more integrated into the everyday running of organisations, particularly when it comes to financial planning.
For Lidl, this is manifesting itself in careful estate planning; but Coburn says he’s seeing the same cautious approach to development across the supply chain.
“We’re likely to see quite different things than we have experienced in the past,” he added. “More storms, more floods, more heatwaves – and that impacts your business.”
Estate planning laws which had been previously based on history will become more focused on the future, he explained.
When climate risk hits the supply chain
But it’s not just bricks and mortar that are set to adapt to our changing world; we have already seen the devastating impact severe weather can have on yields and, consequently, food and drink supply.
2023 brought shortages of some fruit and vegetables as a result of bad weather; while more recently, we’ve witnessed the drastic shift of popular brands turning to ‘chocolate flavouring’ descriptors due to cocoa price hikes.
On-going volatility has seen closer ties between actors in the supply chain, with language pivoting from ‘our customers’ to ‘our partners’.
As Coburn outlined: “A lot of companies are engaging with their suppliers more, so they’re building long-term relationships with their suppliers and [agreeing] 10-year contracts.”
It is also shifting the way manufacturers speak to their suppliers - with discussions over risk more commonplace. In turn, unpredictability has seen producers diversify their portfolio, ensuring they have a plan B if plan A fails.
Links have tightened between manufacturers and farmers too, with more companies managing these changing conditions through green practices, such as regenerative farming, irrigation planning, and the exploration of crop resistant strains.
Manufacturers are injecting money into farms across their international supply chains but we’re also seeing investment in local production.
‘Get real’ about UK food security
As recent history has taught us, geographical diversification is not always the answer. Lockdowns and closures of key shipping routes have further cemented the need for domestic resilience; pushing the food sector and government to focus on more localised production.
While the UK Government set out its intentions for its Good Food Cycle which includes improved resilience and announced a big investment to boost Britain’s food security last April, critics will say it’s too little too late.
October 2025 saw both the head of the Provision Trade Federation and the Food and Drink Federation call on the Government to wake up and build a long-term, coordinated plan.
And just last week Tim Lang told them to “get real about food security” in a column for The Guardian.
Today, the headlines are awash with talk of UK foods shortages, perhaps further evidencing that industry warnings have fallen on deaf ears.
While this all feels a bit too much like ‘Don’t Look Up’, the reports of summer CO2 shortages were also teamed with the reveal that the Government has been conducting scenario planning exercises to evaluate the potential impact of war on the UK industry.
The story, which was first published in The Times, admits that “critical” food supply shortages are not expected, but rather shops may see a lack of product variety.
In another report from The Independent, a Government spokesperson said these worst-case scenario run-throughs are a planning tool rather than a prediction - so there might be some solace in that too.
Let’s just hope that after such a series of serious shocks, these ‘secret’ scenarios are a signal that the Government has finally cottoned on to what the industry is already planning for.
