Applied Nutrition, is planning a £500m IPO on the London Stock Exchange, Sky News reported over the weekened. Since it was founded in 2014, the Liverpool-based startup has grown into an international supplier of nutrition supplements for athletes and fitness fans. It was the SME Brand of the Year at The Grocer Gold Awards in 2023.
Labour is set to water down Tory green tax on packaging, The Sunday Times reports. Manufacturers of bottles and other packaging are to be charged less under changes planned to the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme. The charges will be lower across almost all packaging types, from plastic to glass when prices are announced this week.
It’s ’the end of the road for supermarket yellow discount labels’ says the Mail on Sunday. It reports that the major multiples are planning to introduce electronic shelf-edge labels across their estates, as they ‘play catch up with discounters Aldi and Lidl’, which ‘have already rolled out the technology across their stores’.
A group of 30 food businesses, including leading supermarkets and food producers, has written to environment secretary Steve Reed, calling for mandatory reporting of food waste, The Guardian reports. Forcing companies to confront the reality of how much they produce [through the Food Data Transparency Partnership] will results in better behaviour, including more efficient processes and increased efforts to reuse surpluses, said the letter, which was coordinated by Jamie Crummie, co-founder of the food waste business Too Good to Go. Signatories include Tesco, Waitrose, Aldi, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, as well as the British Retail Consortium. Food producers included Nestlé, Princes, Innocent Drinks, Yoplait and Yo! Sushi are also on the list.
UK grocery retailers and investors are urging the government to tackle diet-related ill health with tighter regulatory scrutiny of the food industry, the Financial Times reports. Weighing in on the nation’s food policy for the first time since the election, Tesco, Iceland, Nomad Foods along with institutional investors BNP Paribas Asset Management and Rathbone Greenbank Investments said companies should be legally required to report on the percentage of revenue from sales of products high in fat, salt and sugar – a reference to the watering down of plans under the previous Conservative government’s plans to introduce a mandatory Food Data Transparency Partnership.
Naked Juice, the new-ish owners of Tropicana, have warned of a profits squeze as orange juice prices soar, the Sunday Times reports.
’Troubled Asda is back to square one in its search for a new chief after Mohsin Issa’s exit,’ reports The Daily Telegraph (£). The piece cites City sources who say the search by City headhunter Spencer Stuart has failed to identify a single candidate, after Asda approached “a whole conveyor belt of people who turned it down”. But an Asda source told the Telegraph: “It has afforded us the opportunity to look again.” The Grocer looked at the runners and riders for the chief executive role, which could command a salary of up to £10m, in an editorial on Friday.
A second outbreak of avian flu in two years has resulted in a 60% increase in egg prices in the last five years, the Financial Times reports. Americans are paying over three times as much for eggs today as five years ago, said Rabobank, which compiled the report. In comparison, South African egg prices had only doubled in the same period while Russia, Japan, Brazil, Europe and India experienced prices rises of between 50% and 90%, said Rabobank.
Kroger’s $25bn acquisition of supermarket rival Albertson ‘hangs on the fate of its workers’, the Financial Times reports. The largest ever US supermarket merger, which would combine the biggest and second biggest supermarket chains in the US, together employ over 700,000 staff across more than 5,000 stores. But unions are divided over the merits of the deal, the FT explains.
Finally, and talking of mega acquisitions, there’s a profile of Alain Bouchard, the ’pathological entrepreneur’ behind Canadian convenience chain Couche Tard in the Financial Times, as it bids to snap up Japanese-owned chain 7-Eleven continues.
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