The Restaurant Group

TRG has an antibiotics policy that is publicly available on its website, which is part of their broader Sourcing and Sustainability Policy.

In their response to FAIRR, the company stated that "all suppliers of meat, fish and seafood" are subject to their antibiotics use policy.

Their policy covers all operations, suppliers and farmers in UK and non-UK markets.

The company states that "reducing and refining the use of the 'critically important' antibiotics – to the point where these antibiotics are only to be used where sensitivity testing, or the results of recent sensitivity testing, shows that no other antibiotics are likely to work. Phasing out the routine, purely preventative use of antibiotics in groups of entirely healthy animals (prophylaxis)". We have confirmed with the company that their policy encompasses all antibiotics and it prohibits growth promotion and prophylactic use across all species and markets.

TRG is currently in the process of gathering information from suppliers and have committed "to defining specific targets and implementation timelines for suppliers to achieve by 2021. The company has also indicated that although their current policy does not yet include a target date, TRG expects all their protein suppliers to comply with EU prophylactic use law when it comes into force in 2022.

The company has indicated that they are currently working with suppliers to collect relevant data to inform the current state of antibiotics use and inform future reduction plans across their supply chains. TRG has confirmed that their farmed fish suppliers "record use of any antibiotics, but that these are not disclosed. We are awaiting feedback from our beef/pork suppliers, however, as this is part of the passport arrangements, we understand that they will confirm that records are maintained but not externally shared. We are currently investigating how we can reliably track and report this information".

TRG has confirmed that supplier compliance on antibiotics use is monitored via internal audits only. The company uses the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex), which is a data capture platform used for sharing sourcing data on supply chains to risk assess its supply chains.

TRG responded to the investor letter providing insightful answers to all questions. TRG has directly engaged with the investor coalition to update on their antibiotics policy and implementation programme. Their response is available here.