The strapline of this week’s IGD conference was “energy innovation and positive thinking”.

But for much of the day most of the energy on stage – and in the corridors of the new Park Plaza venue – seemed to be focused on how on earth retailers and suppliers could possibly survive what one boss after the next seemed to agree was many years to come of unbridled austerity.

Much of the innovation, on the other hand, would be sapped on reinventing systems so the industry could prevent itself going the same way as MPs and bankers – by rebuilding trust over food and price transparency in the wake of the horsemeat scandal.

The positive thinking came in the vain hope that the chap from Bacardi might soon finish his speech.

So it was a refreshing change when Waitrose chief Mark Price took to the stage as the last big cheese, to urge against too much drastic re-invention.

Price, one retailer who definitely has had something to shout about in the past 12 months, might have struck an overly optimistic tone. Yet it chimed with some of those in the hall who felt this year’s event had swung too far towards the challenges facing the industry rather than shouting about its achievements and great potential.

(Take the representative of Mumsnet, for example, who took to the stage like some great soothsayer to tell the industry dinosaurs how it should be done. Important as they may be in the age of digital, should the UK’s top retailers really be living in fear of Mumsnet? At one point Asda marketing boss Stephen Smith seemed to suggest that the future of one of the world’s biggest companies would be decided purely by mums on social media.)

Of course there was plenty of marketing spin on show today but it was down to Price to say what many thought – that it was all very well discussing how power is transferring to today’s online customers, but too much change can ignore the most important elements of all; ones that have stood the test of time.

“It’s all about the food, stupid,” he said, adapting Bill Clinton’s famous phrase. “It’s all about the quality of food you can produce, the price you sell it at and the service you give to go with it.

“If you go down a purely mechanical route, I think you will lose them,” he said of today’s fickle customer.

“If you run away with the mechanics of it, I think something will be lost. I genuinely believe that food retail in the UK is the best in the world and I see a group of exciting retailers who are executing it and a whole new world of exciting opportunities.”

Now that is positive thinking – and jargon-free to boot.

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