l Our listing aims to identify the UK's biggest private grocery chains. During our research we excluded all companies that are wholly owned subsidiaries of bigger, publicly quoted groups ­ such as Whistlestop, now owned by Compass. We have also excluded chains which are owned by foreign companies ­ such as Oddbins or First Quench (now owned by Nomura, so not a private company either) and the hard discounters Aldi, Lidl and Netto. We also excluded any company with a listing on the Stock Exchange ­ no matter how little of its share capital is quoted. And given this project was intended to highlight the top independent owner/operators in the business we thought it right to exclude Waitrose and the Co-ops (even though they are technically private companies). There are a handful of companies that are private, but in which venture capitalists own a majority of the equity (ie: greater than 51%). Given the managers of these businesses also have a stake in them, we thought it right they were included in our survey and in our feature. However, we have listed them separately to emphasise the fact they have outside investors. l Having identified the companies we felt could appear in our Top 50 we asked them to fill in a questionnaire which was used to compile their listing. The information was taken in good faith by The Grocer for this listing. A few companies did not want to take part. In those cases where we thought our final listing would be materially affected by their omission we have gone to Companies House to source the latest financial information. l The sales figure quoted in the table is for the last full financial year for which information is available. The figure is also net of VAT, commission-based services such as Lottery and petrol. l Inevitably with a project of this kind, some companies may be missed during the research phase. If you think you should be on the list let us know. We plan to make this Top 50 an annual event. {{FEATURES }}