Class, net zero and the future of retail: LIVE unwrapped

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Net zero, middle-class problems and how retailers are using tech and innovation to drive growth and stay ahead of the competition – here’s what you missed if you weren’t able to make it to Retail Week x The Grocer LIVE 2025.

Breaking the middle class barrier

“I like to say we offer a business class service at EasyJet prices,” said Ocado’s Amit Chitnis.

“That means there is no premium customer any more. There are need states and the same person is looking for different things at different points in time and buying them in the same basket.

“Our value perception a few years ago was not OK – we were simply too expensive. But we have done a lot of work over the last two years. In retail these jobs are never done but we have done very well.

”Ocado price promise has been massively helpful. Customers don’t need to do the maths, they feel reassured that we’re the same price as Tesco. That upper-middle-class perception simply isn’t true any more.”

Net zero and sleepless nights

Julian Hunt, vice president of communications for Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, admitted he “has sleepless nights about the fact that the world is literally on fire” when quizzed on what the industry should do as it fails to make progress on legally binding net zero agreements.

“Increasingly we have seen industry stepping up to the plate and trying to deliver change to address some of those big challenges,” he added.

”Collaboration is happening everywhere – within the business as we look for ways to be more efficient, all the way through to the wider industry, on water or the carbon roadmap for industry. So yes, I do see things happening which allow me to have some non-sleepless nights, but I think we all recognise that the challenge ahead of us is pretty scary.”

The future is dark

It’s not as bleak as it sounds for Thierry Garnier, CEO of Kingfisher.

“We believe a lot in dark stores,” he said. “For us, the store is a place where we prepare online, and that’s a change of mindset. The idea that the store is just a place to buy would not be the future.”

An uncomfortable truth

IGD director of health & sustainability Kirsty Saddler said the industry could achieve net zero by 2050, but only if it makes “massive transitions in agriculture” and faces up to the “really uncomfortable truth that there is a real need for population diet shift”.

She also revealed that, when developing the cross-sector total food transition plan, the IGD focused on ”engagement, not necessarily agreement”.

”If we’d set it up with the aim of getting everyone to agree then we know it wouldn’t have been as true and as stretching as it needed to be. We needed businesses from the same sector to be in the same room, having those difficult conversations.”

Pack it in

In terms of lessons learnt, Sam Ludlow-Taylor, ethics and sustainability lead at Waitrose, said it remained abundantly clear that consumers still felt very strongly about packaging.

“We are trying very hard to reduce unnecessary packaging but that needs to be balanced with food waste and various food safety issues as well. We have trialled various packaging reduction initiatives, especally in new stores, and really tried to speak to the customer about buying loose fruit & veg, but found that actually value-driven propositions were landing better.

”They care, they really do, but when it comes to the point of handing money over at the till it’s not always that easy.”

Data and loyalty drive retail media

Some 20% of ad spend is set to go towards retail media this year, according to Mirakl. It’s a figure set to send the value of loyalty up yet further.

With the insight into what shoppers are buying, bricks and mortar retailers with loyalty schemes are getting closer to predicting which aisles customers frequent, and can target their ads with ever more laser precision.

Which is why the industry could benefit from standardising its metrics, says Tash Whitmey, MD for Tesco Media and Insight Platform. “We don’t look at retail media as an opportunity to monetise our customers and our suppliers,” she told delegates. “We see that’s the outcome of getting it right.”

Elsewhere, Paula Bobbett, chief digital officer at Boots, revealed 40% of sales now touch the Boots app, home of the retailer’s digital Advantage Card.

“It helps us start really connecting the omnichannel experience. It’s really driven loyalty and data.”

Bobbett also shared the significant take-up of Boots’ loyalty card – now held by 75% of the UK’s female population.

Big Mac, big dreams

It’s Big Macs, not the big four, that inspire Co-op e-commerce director and MD of quick commerce Chris Conway.

“The organisation I look at the most is McDonald’s,” he said. “In the quick commerce space they’re the ones. I tell my team ‘don’t worry about the other grocers, see what McDonald’s are doing’.

”Because you see their tech innovations and going digital, how in new restaurants they’ve made space for [delivery] riders and how they’ve changed how that restaurant operates. Effectively it’s a mini fulfilment centre and a restaurant as well. It’s fascinating and it’s how I see the future of Co-op going.”