News of Greggs remarkable turnaround gets a good showing today as The Financial Times (£) reports that the 41% jump in profits at the high street baker was helped just as much by low inflation and the UK’s economic recovery as by the move towards food-to-go.
The company increased like-for-like sales by 4.5% in 2014, compared with a 0.8% decline in the year before, and The Times (£) leads with it boosting its dividend and restarting a share buyback programme as further evidence of the chain’s turnaround.
Coca-Cola is fighting back in the war on sugar with plans to push its low and no calorie variants to the fore. The Times (£) says Coke will market its four versions of Coke as a single brand in an attempt to make Britain the first country in which more than 50% of its sales are low or no calorie. From May, the group’s marketing and advertising will promote Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coca-Coca Zero and Coca-Cola Life under a “one brand strategy”. And all bottles and cans will adopt the government’s front-of-pack labelling scheme, with colour-coding to show how much fat, saturated fat, salt, sugar and calories are in each drink.
Food safety experts are sceptical about McDonald’s intent to meet a new pledge to stop serving chickens fed and injected with antibiotics at its 14,000 US restaurants (BBC). The chain will stop selling chicken raised with antibiotics which are important to human health. It follows pressure from US government bodies which are worried the practice is contributing to the rise in antibiotic-resistant infections. However, The Guardian notes that food safety critics have pointed out McDonald’s has yet to fulfil a similar pledge from 2003.
A new year spending spree across shops in the Eurozone has raised hopes that a recovery may finally be about to rear its head. Retail sales across the 19 member state expanded by 1.1% in January, according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. It beat investors’ forecasts by a wide margin and was 3.7% higher than a year ago. A €60bn-a-month programme of quantitative easing is set to start flowing this month and plunging petrol prices have provided a boost to consumers’ spending power, with the weakness of the euro against the dollar also helping exporters (The Guardian).
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