Co-op's pop-up shop reached more than 317,000 festival goers across five sites in one season. It had no measurement systems, no emissions targets and no tracking of its own impacts. That was the finding.
Co-op · Latitude; Reading; Leeds; Creamfields; Isle of Wight · Various, UK · 2021 · Retail and consumer · Consultancy
Co-op ran a pop-up shop at five UK festivals in the 2021 season. Combined capacity across the five sites put the shop in front of more than 317,000 festival goers. Co-op had a ten-point climate plan. What it did not have was any line of sight on whether the festival shop was consistent with it. Pie Factory was asked to observe the operation in the field, assess it against Co-op's own plan, and say where the gaps were. This was an assessment, not a build.
We observed and tracked the build, the production and the live workings of the shop on site, and assessed how efficiently it ran. The method was field observation rather than data collection, because there was no data to collect: nothing was being logged by the operation itself. So we recorded what could be seen. How the shop was built, what it was built from, what was consumed, what was given away, what was thrown away, and how the same kit was handled between festivals. Every material was identified and recorded. The findings, and these are findings rather than a specification we wrote, were a PVC marquee made of virgin plastic, one-time use plastic signage printed specifically for each festival, heavy shipping containers, a virgin plastic flower wall surrounding a video tunnel, free packets of crisps in single use plastic, a reverse vending machine, and uniforms made from a cotton and rPET mix that sheds microplastics. Each was then mapped against Co-op's ten-point climate plan, point by point, to show where the shop supported the plan and where it contradicted it. The output was a gap analysis and a set of recommendations, including the recommendation that measurement systems be put in place at all, because without them no target can be set and no improvement can be evidenced.
The report had to tell a client with a published ten-point climate plan that its most public consumer touchpoint was outside it. In the report's own words, the impacts of the pop-up festival shop were not being tracked or measured in any way. The shop had no measurement systems in place. It had no targets or goals in relation to reducing emissions. That is the whole finding. There was nothing to benchmark, nothing to compare year on year, and no basis for any reduction claim. Naming that was more useful to Co-op than any number we could have produced from assumptions.
There is no measured outcome. No carbon figure is published and none is calculated here, because the shop was not measuring anything and the assessment did not retrofit a footprint from assumptions. What the work produced was a documented baseline of the shop's materials and operations, a point-by-point gap analysis against Co-op's ten-point climate plan, and recommendations. The first recommendation was that measurement be introduced. The only figures on this page are venue capacities and reach.