Sandy Parsonage, Sainsbury’s supply chain director

Sandy Parsonage, Sainsbury’s supply chain director

You can be as cheap as chips and do service with a smile, but if the product isn’t on shelf everything else is irrelevant. Worse still, be out of stock a couple of times and customers won’t come back. So availability will always be crucial and no one understands this better than Sainsbury’s. Whether it’s down to canny forecasting, or effective replenishment on the shop floor, or a combination of both, that Sainsbury’s has won this award for the last five years is seriously impressive.

Its average availability over the year was 96.6%, a dip from last year’s 97.4% but still ahead of Tesco, which finished on 95.9% (an identical figure to last year), or Waitrose, which finished on 95.2% (an improvement on the 94.2% it returned in 2016) and a full two percentage points ahead of Asda and Morrisons, which averaged 94.6%.

Sainsbury’s also returned the highest number of full baskets, with 21.