Notes

Retail parks, where the expansion of our chain of larger Food Warehouse stores is focused, are subject to a myriad of historical restrictions, making the planning process complex and encumbered with red tape. They are trying to invest £1.2m to open a new Food Warehouse store on an established retail park, creating 30 new jobs, but this has taken 18 months and could drag on longer. In Tonbridge, where we now have the opening of a new Food Warehouse store scheduled for this summer, but has taken up to a full year to finalise.
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PO said the tool was developed in direct response to feedback from postmasters who asked for more up-to-date sales and remuneration data available in one easy-to-use place. Postmasters will have full control over which data they want their staff to see, meaning they can share details with their branch managers should they wish to.
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Arla’s UK revenue grew by 2.6% to 2.17bn pounds last year, with overall branded ¬volumes up 3.8%. The first half of 2021 was buoyed by a continuation of the heightened in-home consumption seen in 2020 as a result of covid lockdowns in the UK. But despite the effects of accelerating inflationary cost pressures and Arla’s well-documented driver and labour shortages, Arla saw a full reopening of the UK foodservice sector, leading to a 19% year on year volume growth for its foodservice business. Arla’s Masterbrand saw a 9.6% growth across all its products.
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The initiative said last year that Ivory Coast had planted almost 10 million tress in 2020, while Ghana restored about 226 thousand hectares of forest area. But, environmental campaign group Mighty Earth suggests that Ivory Coast and Ghana has actually lost a surprising amount of forest since the initiative.
The UK said it aimed to “make it illegal for larger businesses in the UK to use commodities whose production is associated with large-scale forest loss such as cocoa, beef, soy, coffee, maize and palm oil”
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Due to the increase in food insecurity post-lockdown, which is double the percentage of 2018, ONS have announced that it will change the way it collects and reports on the cost of food prices and inflation to consider a broader range of income levels and household circumstances. Retailers taking a transformational approach to the way they embrace technology, to create a new-found level of connection with their customers and attempt to create value beyond just price.
The likes of Netflix and Spotify have demonstrated just how strong a connection can be built with customers by using technology as a critical enabler. The result will be the creation of ‘next-level personalisation’ – landing the right communication with the right customer at just the right moment across multiple touchpoints. For example, Waitrose plans to improve its myWaitrose programme by offering customers personalised discounts on their most purchased products. Meanwhile M&S has seen its Sparks membership double to 14 million since the start of last year. The My Morrisons platform has incorporated charitable programmes to help people in their communities. So the opportunity is there for retailers to complement their traditional price-cut investments with a transformational technology-enabled approach to achieve next-level personalisation with their customers.
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Under the new system JTI said it was upskilling all trade reps to the new role of business advisors, who would work will all retailers in a specific geographical area rather than across the different channels. It said the advisors would be become total category experts with greater knowledge of the core tobacco products as well as vaping, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches. They would also be able to provide information on responsible retailing such as youth access prevention and how to tackle illicit trade.