Morrisons trading director for frozen Rebecca Stanton is leaving the supermarket after just under two years in the role.
Stanton, who is yet to confirm her next role, left the supermarket this week. She’ll be succeeded by senior buying manager for frozen Joe Pleasance, as interim trading director.
Well respected among suppliers, Stanton has played a leading role in the relaunch and development of Morrisons’ own-label frozen proposition since joining from B&M-owned Heron Foods in March 2024.
She previously spent five years at B&M, and three years as category director at Iceland between 2014 and 2017. She has also worked for Nestlé and The Co-op and sits on the board of The British Frozen Food Federation.
Her departure follows a wide-scale restructure of Morrisons’ trading team in March, under group trading director Andrew Staniland. As revealed by The Grocer at the time, it saw five layers of reporting consolidated into three, by combining some category director roles into heads of trading areas.
No redundancies were planned as a result, with the changes leading to the creation of 10 new roles.
It is understood Stanton is one of a number of senior category directors who have announced plans to leave Hilmore House over recent weeks.
Morrisons declined to comment other than to confirm Stanton is set to leave the business. Stanton posted a tribute to her colleagues on LinkedIn, confirming her next chapter would start in a “couple of weeks”. She did not respond to The Grocer’s request for comment.
Morrisons CEO Rami Baitiéh is battling to revive his thawing turnaround plan. Despite early progress, including Morrisons’ most successful quarterly results for four years in January 2025, volumes have slumped and the traditional big four grocer is within an aisle’s breath of being overtaken by Lidl as the UK’s fifth-largest supermarket.
Its market share slipped 0.2% to 8.3% during the 12 weeks to 5 October according to Worldpanel by Numerator’s latest market share, while Lidl’s remained steady at 8.2%. The discounter – which this week revealed a tripling in annual pre-tax profits in the year to 28 February – actually overtook Morrisons in July on food and drink sales.
No comments yet