shopper

A new industry board has been formed to try to solve grocery’s supply chain problems and drive sales by as much as £2bn.

The Retail Grocery Advisory Board represents almost 80% of the UK retail grocery market and includes the big four, Boots, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Co-op, Dairy Crest, Kellogg’s, Mondelez International, Müller UK and Ireland, Nestlé, Ocado, PepsiCo, P&G, Unilever and Waitrose.

It has been formed under the umbrella of GS1 UK, the not-for-profit supply chain specialists, and will be co-chaired by George Wright, commercial director for strategy and operations at Tesco, and Richard Sadler, customer director at Unilever UK and Ireland.

Wright said he looked forward to working with other retailers and brands to better understand and deal with the issues across the industry that everyone faced.

“Retail today is hugely complex and competitive, but our aim is to work together to find solutions that will bring greater efficiencies to the industry and also inspire the rest of the industry to collaborate further.”

Sadler said the board would aim to tackle some of the UK’s most challenging data quality issues and lead it in developing solutions to support the increasing demands of customers.

“We’ll focus on identifying the key areas that retailers and brands can work together on - such as how to accelerate change, increase sustainability, reduce waste and achieve mutual productivity.”

GS1 said the board wanted to improve customer experiences and deliver efficiencies across supply chains.

Advisory board members were committed to identifying areas where they could work collaboratively to address some of “the challenges and pain points” the retail grocery sector faced, such as changing shopper habits due to the rise of online and mobile shopping.

“They are focusing on how to unlock value in the end-to-end value chain that will ultimately deliver benefits both for the industry and the customer,” GS1 said.

gary lynch and george wright

George Wright (left) and Gary Lynch

The board’s initial attention will be on two projects, which it called ‘Digital DNA’ and ‘Perfect Order’, tackling the quality of industry data and the logistics of supply chains.

Ian Walters, market development manager at GS1, said Digital DNA would look at the everyday raft of data quality issues from information that customers could access on retailers’ websites to product definition, nutritional values and ingredients to the dimensions of the casing that arrived at depots.

“There is a raft of product attributes that people need to know to be able to carry out their responsibilities,” he said, adding that out-of-date equipment and human error were other factors.

GS1 UK said industry analysis alone had shown that there was “a £2bn opportunity” that could be on offer by improving the data that supported product availability and sales.

At the same time, project Perfect Order would focus on the whole process of ordering a product to its eventual sale and try to establish industry-wide processes for inbound logistics to drive efficiencies and eliminate avoidable costs.

“At GS1 UK, we’re proud to bring together so many retailers and brands from the retail grocery sector,” said Gary Lynch, GS1 UK’s CEO.

“This shows that industry collaboration in the right areas is more important than ever before. As an independent and neutral membership organisation, we’re able to facilitate and enable this collaboration to provide a strong foundation for effective retail operations.”