A round-up of supermarket news and gossip
It all started in September 2005 with a seemingly innocuous announcement that Simon Laffin, the former finance and property director at Safeway, was joining CVC Capital, the British private equity firm, as its European retail adviser. At that stage the 14-year Safeway veteran was to begin work on CVC’s most ambitious project to date – the buyout of J Sainsbury, Britain’s third biggest supermarket chain and the first FTSE 100 company to potentially fall prey to private equity. What CVC planned was to invest £3bn over four or five new stores – 3 million ft2 of retail space – and offer employees and management a 15% stake in the company.

Now we will never know, as the Sainsbury family totally rejects the current offers.

Some sympathy though for the investment bankers who will miss out on more than £100m in advisory fees after one of the City’s biggest ever-potential deals crumbled.

Waitrose will double its sales to £8bn over the next decade under ambitious plans drawn up by Mark Price, its new md. The group is preparing to expand organically after several years in which it has grown rapidly through acquisitions. The plan is to increase sales from £3.7bn now to £8bn by 2017. The group has 183 shops at present. Waitrose has stated that there are six million potential customers who do not have access to a store.

Carrefour hopes to sign a partnership with a local player, giving it access to the Indian market. Earlier, Indian daily newspaper The Economic Times cited Carrefour’s chief executive in India, Gerard Freiszmuth, as saying the group is putting its plans on hold until policy issues on foreign direct investment in the retail sector are made clear.

Marie Melnyk, the former md of Wm Morrison, was handed a £2.93m pay off when she stepped down from the supermarket chain in 2006. Analysts expressed dismay at the size of the compensation package. Marie was on record as saying “I thought it was OK.”

Tesco’s purchase of a former Co-op store in Slough is the first single retail site acquisition referred to by the competition Commission.

Statistics just released indicate that the actual spend across the tills for Tesco’s “computers for schools” to present a £700 computer is a staggering £379,000. The same chain has also announced that it will open its first own-brand mini-supermarket in Japan, as part of a new expansion in the world’s second largest retail market.

Food packaging adds more than 20% to the cost of buying fruit at a leading supermarket, a Lite investigation revealed. The Lite found that a shopper at Waitrose buying a large bowl of fresh fruit worth £12.41 could expect to pay a staggering £4.67 extra if they chose pre-packed produce.

Archie Norman, former chief of Asda is eyeing a bid of as much as £1.3bn for Brakes, the UK’s biggest food distribution company. Marks and Spencer has ousted Anthony Thompson, its retail director as part of a management reshuffle.

Fresh doubts have surfaced over the future ownership of the Somerfield convenience-store chain. Company chairman John Lovering has hinted that the group is being ”grown to attract anybody with the largest bag of money.”

Sainsbury grew faster than Tesco over a three month period for the first time since 1993. The Co-operative group is to pay out £42.3m to members, which is nearly £10m up on last time.

How near is your local? Tesco released a 28-page document arguing the point that the UK grocery market should be considered as a national market and that “local” should mean as much as a 30-minute drive from a store. Not surprisingly rival retailers and competition experts dismissed as “ridiculous” the argument from the retailer that shoppers would be prepared to drive for half an hour to purchase some products at 5% cheaper.

Waitrose has made planning application to build a giant superstore in Southend-on-sea.

GEMINI