Sainsbury’s cuts 3,000 jobs as cafés close for good

Sainsbury’s is cutting 3,000 roles, closing the remainder of its in-store cafés, and removing hot food counters as Simon Roberts “accelerates” plans to shave £1bn in costs from the business.

The job losses affect head office senior management roles as well as store staff, and come alongside a restructure of its senior operating team, designed to streamline the decision-making across Sainsbury’s and Argos.

Sainsbury’s notified staff of the changes today, with the majority of the roles expected to leave the business over the coming months.

The proposals come as Sainsbury’s enters the second year of its Next Level strategy. The changes will help Sainsbury’s bring “core food ranges to more supermarket customers, while simplifying central divisions and management” over the next two years, the supermarket said. 

To create “more space for food” in stores, Sainsbury’s will strip out all patisserie, hot food and pizza counters, and instead make the “most popular” items available on the shop floor. The counters are typically located at the back of the store, and will be replaced with more key lines or categories, for example dedicated FreeFrom areas.

Sainsbury’s will also complete the replacement of its instore bakeries, which began in February last year, by the summer. It is adding new self-serve bread slicers to stores. 

Sainsbury’s will also close it’s 61 remaining company-run instore cafés, finishing a rollback that started in 2022. The company claims that the cafés are not used by the “majority” of its most loyal shoppers, who prefer its third-party cafés and food halls – run by Boparan group – which it will continue to roll out.

Job losses and restructure

Around 20% of the proposed job losses will come from senior management roles at Sainsbury’s store support centre HQ. As part of the restructure, Sainsbury’s chief transformation and general merchandise commercial officer Graham Biggart has been promoted to the new title of managing director, Argos and chief strategy and supply officer.

Rhian Bartlett, formerly chief food commercial officer, will become chief commercial officer, Sainsbury’s. Patrick Dunne, director of property and procurement, will also join the Operating Board as chief property and procurement officer and MD for SmartCharge.  

“We launched our Next Level strategy almost a year ago and are totally focused on making good food joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone, every day,” said Sainsbury’s CEO Simon Roberts.

“As a result, we’re seeing real momentum across our business, with a best-ever value position, leading quality and increasing market share. As we accelerate into year two and beyond of our strategy, we are facing a particularly challenging cost environment, which means we have had to make tough choices about where we can afford to invest and where we need to do things differently to make our business more efficient and effective,” he added.

On the proposed job losses – which follow 1,500 from its instore bakeries announced in February last year – Roberts said: “The decisions we are announcing today are essential to ensure we continue to drive forward our momentum, but have also meant some difficult choices impacting our dedicated colleagues in a number of parts of our business. We’ll be doing everything we can to support anyone impacted by today’s announcements.”

Sainsbury’s would explore opportunities to redeploy affected colleagues elsewhere in the business if possible, it said. 

Sainsbury’s warned of ’tough decisions’

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Sainsbury’s announced a 5% payrise for all hourly store and supply chain colleagues, following its third-quarter results and “record” Christmas sales.

Sainsbury’s has not confirmed whether the ”barrage” of upcoming costs as a result of Rachel Reeve’s budget have influenced the latest round of job cuts. However Roberts warned in November that Sainsbury’s would face “difficult decisions” on food prices and jobs in order to mitigate £140 million in added costs as a result of planned increases in the rate of national insurance. 

Trade unions have criticised the job losses. 

“Once again, the lowest paid workers are paying the price for corporate greed,” said Unite national officer for food Paul Travers. ”Sainsburys is a hugely profitable company and made over half a billion pounds in profit last year. Yet they are proposing thousands of redundancies of store workers and deskilling qualified bakers by removing on-site bakeries. At the same time, well-paid managers are being protected from any job losses.

“This is a blatant example of profiteering on the backs of workers and then sticking the knife in. Sainsburys should be ashamed of themselves for taking this path. Unite will be fighting for our members’ jobs during any consultation process and helping them through this difficult time,” Travers added.