Tesco Stoke-on-Trent: Grocer 33 store of the week

How did your bank holiday sales of 29p veg go? It flew off the shelves. It’s great that at certain times we are able to offer such a fantastic price on these products. When a flush crop like that happens, like we had with celery and lettuce, it’s important you get them to the shelves as quickly as possible.

Did customers appreciate this was tackling food waste? Our customers are becoming more and more knowledgeable about food waste. Obviously we’re trying to sell them food that is competitive in price but we also don’t want to have pallets of ice-berg lettuce unsold.

What else do you do in your store to tackle food waste? We are part of Tesco’s Community Food Collection Programme. We have four charities collecting from us seven nights a week so every night they take away about a dozen big boxes of food. Our staff have also been to see it given out to the charities as part of our Community Food Champions scheme.

How have customers reacted to your adjacencies shake-up? It’s been a very big move so we’ve made sure we’ve had people working as a Here to Help scheme so that we can explain the rationale behind it.

How important is general merchandise, still, in your Extra? Very important. We’ve done a very big piece of work in the past 18 months to make sure the range is relevant for our consumers. We don’t have 15 aisles of DIY any more but we do have the essentials people need.

Do you still have 24-hour opening? Yes. We get a lot of service industry customers such as police, ambulance workers and doctors and nurses. We’re still busy at night-time.

What are the challenges of running a hypermarket? It’s just the size and complexity and number of colleagues in different departments. If running a Metro is running a speed boat then running an Extra is captaining a big cruise liner.