July 02, 2018 Industry news
It was great to attend the Grocery Code Adjudicator’s annual conference last week and hear the good work that Christine Tacon and her team are doing.
Over the past five years, they’ve been working with the leading grocery retailers in the UK to improve the working relationships and equitable commercial arrangements they have with their vast network of suppliers.
Presenting the results of the 2018 survey they conducted with more than 900 suppliers, the presentation was themed “Strong Progress – Fresh Challenges”.
According to their results, suppliers who believed that retailers were complying “consistently well’ or “mostly”, ranged from 84 per cent to 97 per cent, with only two retailers scoring less than 90 per cent. This is a significant improvement on the original 2014 survey, in which suppliers ranked retailers at 58 per cent to 90 per cent in compliance with the Code.
The aforementioned “fresh challenges” were addressed by a couple of the main speakers at the conference.
Darren Blackhurst, group commercial director at Morrisons , stressed the importance of “becoming simpler to do business with” in the retailer/supplier relationship.
He believed that too much administration and too many unnecessary charges were getting in the way of a fervent desire to focus on improving the shopping experience. He pointed to the need for retailers to work collaboratively with their suppliers in the spirit of trust and respect.
Speaking further about the developing needs of shoppers, Nick Downing, commercial director at IGD, identified some emerging consumer expectations. Among these were the desire for improved product information in line with health requirements and addressing the increasing trend towards making more socially-positive purchase decisions.
Further to this, Andrew Griffiths MP, minister in the Department for Business, highlighted the need for fairness and transparency, especially in how retailers work with the smaller suppliers.
It felt reassuring to know that these very issues have been tackled by our own Retail Advisory Group over the last 18 months, and that we are actively working on solutions to help address them. The group is made up of many of our 35,000 members, both large and small, in the retail sector.
They have helped us to co-develop the productDNA service which aims to become an industry solution for simpler and more accurate sharing of product data between suppliers and retailers.
It is also being designed to incorporate the increasing information that shoppers want to know about what they are buying, whether it be to support their personal health and fitness needs or to help them make more ethical purchases.
Casting an eye towards the future, we’re looking forward to helping everybody in the retail equation do what they want to better and in a more informed way.
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