Leading retailers and brands 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 - representing almost 80 per cent of the UK retail grocery market - have joined GS1 UK's new retail advisory group to drive change through collaboration.
The Retail Grocery Advisory Board members have 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.
Members 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 Board is co-chaired by George Wright, commercial director for strategy & operations at Tesco and Richard Sadler, customer director at Unilever UK & Ireland.
Speaking on the news, Wright said: “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 of Unilever added: “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: “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.”
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