Industry leading companies to drive change through collaboration

London, 11 August 2016 – The newly formed Retail Grocery Advisory Board’s objective is to provide industry-wide solutions that will provide a better customer experience while delivering efficiencies throughout the supply chain. The Advisory Board is facilitated by GS1 UK, the supply chain standards organisation, and includes ASDA, Boots, Coca Cola Enterprises, Co-op Group, Dairy Crest, Kellogg’s, Mondelēz International, Morrison’s, Müller UK & Ireland, Nestlé, Ocado, PepsiCo, P&G, Sainsbury's, Tesco, Unilever and Waitrose. Together they represent almost 80% of the UK retail grocery market*.

The Advisory Board members are committed to identifying areas where they can work collaboratively to address some of the challenges and pain points that the retail grocery sector faces today – 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.

The Advisory Board is co-chaired by George Wright, Commercial Director for Strategy & Operations at Tesco Plc and Richard Sadler, Customer Director at Unilever UK & Ireland.

George Wright, Tesco Plc, said: “I’m pleased to be part of the new Retail Grocery Advisory Board and I look forward to working with other retailers and brands to better understand and deal with the industry-wide issues we’re all facing today. 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.”

Richard Sadler, Unilever, said: “I’m delighted to co-chair the newly formed Retail Grocery Advisory Board, which aims to tackle some of UK’s most challenging data quality standards issues and lead the industry in developing solutions that 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.”

Initially, the Advisory Board will focus on two projects – Digital DNA and Perfect Order:

• Digital DNA will address the industry-wide issue of data quality, with the aim to improve the customer experience in this increasingly digital age. In the last five years alone, industry analysis has shown that there is a £2 billion opportunity by improving data in the value chain to support product availability and sales
• Perfect Order will focus on the order-to-cash process, establishing industry-wide harmonised processes for inbound logistics to drive efficiencies while removing avoidable costs

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

*Source: Kantar as at mid-July 2016

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About GS1 UK

For further information or requests for interviews, please contact Tim Haidar: 020 7092 3584 / Tim.Haidar@gs1uk.org.

GS1 UK is a community of over 30,000 members working in retail, foodservice, healthcare and more. GS1 UK is one of 112 independent, not-for-profit GS1 organisations operating across 150 countries worldwide. GS1 UK helps everyone involved in making, moving and trading goods, automate and standardise their supply chain processes using the common language of GS1 global standards.

www.gs1uk.org/grocery