News articles from the FOOD research project.
Many merchants and suppliers in Norway hoped that border residents would acquire new shopping habits after the covid pandemic, and shop more of their household budget at home and not travel so much to Sweden for cheaper food. Naturally, it didn't work out that way.
The founder of Couche-Tard, Alain Bouchard, has done what really should not be possible. From a single gas station in 1980 in Quebec Canada, he has built an international giant with more than 16,000 outlets in Canada, USA, and Europe. Now he hits at Japan.
That the boardroom is a jungle, may be a cliché, but for Nestlé top, Mark Schneider, it became a reality last week. The board chose to replace him with veteran Laurent Freixe.
In Sweden, the two most successful chains, ICA and Axfood, are now led by women. In Norway, we have no women at the CEO level, not in NorgesGruppen, not in Rema 1000 and not in Coop.
Rema 1000 lost a lot of money in Poland, several tens of millions in Sweden, some claim 250 million NOK. In Denmark, on the other hand, things are going really well. Rema 1000 is now one of the leading grocery chains and probably the fastest growing.
Condemned and accused by many, the world's largest retailer and grocery player, Walmart Inc., presents first quarter results in 2025 with strong revenue and operating income growth – in the USA and internationally.
Denmark: Not everything Salling Group takes in turns into gold. The new concept BASALT was established extremely fast but disappeared almost as quickly.
This is claimed by Professor Frode Steen, who is currently particularly concerned with the grocery industry.
OK has entered into a historic agreement with Coop Danmark, whereby OK buys part of Coop Danmark. This partnership involves a capital injection of two billion DKK into Danish Coop.
Danish and half Norwegian-owned Dagrofa came out in 2023 with DKK 426 million in operating earnings, which is the best result for the food group in more than 20 years, many of them with solid deficits.
The Spanish supermarket chain DIA is owned by the Russian billionaire and oligarch Mikhail Fridman. Despite recent EU sanctions, the supermarket chain is still unaffected by EU politics against Russian oligarchs and continues its operations in Spain, Argentina, and Brazil under the DIA brand.
Many consumers have Finnish Fazer liquorice and candies as a favourite for their Saturday and Sunday cuddles. Turnover in the Finnish Fazer Group's confectionery branch landed at a record level in 2023, but operating profit is heavily burdened by divestments and write-downs in “green business areas”.
ICA, once the clear winner in the Swedish grocery market, is again losing market shares to Axfood. The relatively new CEO of ICA AB, Nina Jönsson, claims that things are getting better for ICA towards the end of 2023 after extensive measures, not least on the price and cost side.
With a surprisingly robust growth in the fourth quarter for both Willys and Hemköp, Axfood once again proved its ability to gain market share in Sweden, writes Kepler Cheuvreux Carnegie in an analysis. The investment bank repeats its “buy” recommendation and target price of SEK 330 for the Axfood share.
Norwegians' daytrips to shop across the border in Sweden continue to be at a lower level than before the pandemic. The trend through 2023 points towards a stabilization of cross-border trade in Sweden at a new and lower level, reports Norway's biggest bank DNB in a press release.
French Carrefour have grown tired of what they believe to be unjustified price overcharging from PepsiCo and have stopped selling several products in a number of countries.
Lidl was one of the main sponsors of the World Handball Championship that France won against Norway last week. The sponsorship is matching because Lidl is the fastest growing grocery retailer in the world, a “world champion” in groceries according to many experts.
16 of the 18 people who had been prosecuted for involvement in the ICA insider scandal were convicted of insider trading by the Stockholm District Court in December. One ICA retailer in southeastern Sweden has been sentenced to three years and two months in prison for aggravated insider trading – the hardest punishment for insider trading in Sweden ever.
Danish and international consumers prioritise better animal welfare over a smaller climate footprint if they must pay a higher price for their pork. This is shown by a new study from the University of Copenhagen, which has also examined consumer priorities in Germany, Great Britain, Shanghai and China.
Five years ago, the English frozen food concept Iceland entered the Norwegian grocery market through a franchise agreement. Since 2018, Iceland Norway has suffered a total loss of over NOK 40 million for the Norwegian investors. The chain had at most six stores in Norway, but four were closed earlier this year, according to Dagens Næringsliv. Brexit is part of the problem.
Many analysts and experts laughed at Lidl when the German chain first established in Great Britain in 1994. Now the chain has a market share of 7.6 percent in GB and no less than 9.1 percent in London!
Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, has announced initial commitments from the country's top five grocery chains to stabilize food prices.
In Sweden and Finland, the competition authorities have conducted a coordinated raid against several food suppliers. The companies are suspected of coordinating purchase and sale prices.
Nestlé is ranked the world’s most valuable food brand by Brand Finance, a consultancy. Coca-Cola is not surprisingly ranked as the most valuable non-alcoholic beverage brand.
We see it all over Europe. Discounters take market shares from supermarkets. It happens in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and UK to name a few markets.
Global convenience store giant 7-Eleven has begun a test run of a robot delivery service in South Korea in conjunction with Neubility, a South Korean startup.
Forget Volo, forget Coca-Cola, forget Ikea. Until less than a year ago, Sweden's strongest brand was ICA. Now it is history! How can such a strong brand break down in less than two years?
Lidl tried to build a business in Norway from 2004 to 2008 but had to pull out with significant losses. In Sweden, on the other hand, which besides lower import tariffs, in many ways is not entirely unlike Norway, Europe's largest grocery chain is doing well.
“It is not the supermarkets that have shovelled money into the inflationary year 2022,” emphasizes Salling Group's outgoing CEO, Per Bank. “Carlsberg earns 12 times more than grocery retailers in Denmark, it is not fair”, he stresses.
For the seventh year in a row, ICA publishes its future report – this year the focus is communication and marketing. The report examines AI (artificial intelligence), the emergence of new business models and what the future of sustainability work looks like.
Tesco’s fresh request that its suppliers should contribute more towards the cost of fulfilling online orders could result in other retailers copying their move. It is obviously a development that the suppliers do not want, in Great Britain or other markets.
Dagrofa makes progress in 2022 results despite difficult market conditions. The food service and logistics businesses pull up the overall result. CEO Tomas Pietrangeli has succeeded in stopping the losses in Dagrofa and has now delivered two years of profits.
The 200 participants who attended the NHH Food conference 13 March participated in a seminar full of professionalism and competence. NHH Food is now, arguably, the most important conference of the year - on the grocery market.
Some quarters claim that competition in the grocery retail sector in Norway is too weak. There is no basis for such conclusions, according to the master students Adrian Jacobsen & Douglas Jansson at NHH. On the contrary, there is much evidence that Norwegian grocery retailers are the most efficient in Scandinavia.
Danske Coop stop home deliveries due to lack of volumes and profit and terminates the leases on a number of warehouse buildings throughout the country.
"We are leaving a year that has been exceptionally turbulent. We had a lower result and margins than last year in ICA Sweden and in addition the profit sharing from the ICA stores is lower compared to 2021", comments CEO Nina Jönsson.
With inflation driving significant increases in production costs and retail prices across most major markets IGD emphasize that there will be a concentrated focus from retailers and suppliers on driving out costs and improving the efficiency of supply chains.
In Denmark, Aldi is selling out to Norwegian Rema 1000 after losing millions and millions in the Danish grocery market over several decades. In the UK, Aldi has never done better with market share growth and increased profitability. The big difference is not entirely obvious.
German Aldi has never made money in Denmark. Amazingly Rema 1000 has made money from day one, since Odd Reitan opened the first Danish store in 1994. The success of Rema is one of the reasons why Aldi has sold most of its Danish stores to the Norwegians.
While ICA is losing market share, it seems that arch-competitor, Axfood, is gaining market share.
“Since late summer, the difficult economic situation has become obvious to all of us and higher costs greatly affect the behaviour of our customers who prioritize low price and increase the proportion of low-price products when shopping,” says Per Strömberg about the results in ICA for the third quarter.
The buyout will form one of the world's absolute largest retail companies and number two in USA, only behind Walmart.
The goal is for solar energy to cover at least 25 percent of Salling Group's energy consumption in 2028.
Per Strömberg has chosen to leave ICA Gruppen, where he has served as CEO since 2012. The Board of Directors has appointed Nina Jönsson as the new CEO. She is currently CEO of Plantagen, a garden chain.
Maybe the American grocery chain Kroger should be a role model for other retail chains in the world? Maybe for many authorities too? It is not a human right not to be vaccinated, but a duty to take the immunisation, Kroger has decided.
The world's largest food and beverage producer, Nestlé, is selling parts of its equity portfolio in L'Oreal, a world-renowned manufacturer and marketer of beauty products.
The world's second largest grocery chain and founder of the format hypermarkets, French Carrefour, recently opened its new “Flash store” in Paris.
The Swedish grocery giant, ICA, no longer wants to be in the stock market's open spotlight, but wish to go private, behind more closed doors. Maybe because it will be more difficult for competitors to “read” ICA?
In the current inflationary environment, where FMCG manufacturers are looking to pass on the full impact of cost increases to consumers, retailers in many markets are strategically poised to hold prices of their private label products in categories where they want to increase penetration and grow value sales.
Shareholders in Morrisons have approved CD&R’s £7.1bn takeover offer, bringing the curtain down on a fiercely contested battle for the UK’s fourth-largest grocer.
Considering the great focus on climate change throughout the world, Coop Denmark has set itself a goal of reducing its CO2 emissions by 75 percent by 2025.
Tesco’s forecast for full-year earnings are impressive. Nonetheless there are considerable headwinds ahead, but the company benefits from a robust supply chain.
Covid has created supply problems in all industries all over the world the past year. The combination of Brexit in the UK and Covid triples the challenges. Iceland, the frozen food chain in the UK, warns that there may be empty shelves for Christmas.
Fakta is no longer Denmark’s second largest grocery chain. Rema 1000 has taken that position with 353 stores against Fakta’s 340 stores. However, the lead dog is still Netto, owned by The Salling group, with 516 discount stores.
Industry slippage or industry mix, as some prefer to call it, is nothing new, but nonetheless very important in all retailing. This year it is one of the main topics at the FOOD conference.
Ica Sweden did not have the same growth as the market during the second quarter. It also includes e-commerce which is related to the very strong volume increase that the Ica stores managed to achieve last year when they grew much faster than the market.
Morrisons’, Britain's fourth-biggest supermarket group after Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda, has agreed a 6.3-billion-pound ($8.7 billion) takeover by a trio of investment groups led by Fortress Investment Group.
US private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice is expected to push ahead with its pursuit of Morrisons despite an initial offer at £5.5bn being rejected. Analysts believe the UK’s fourth largest supermarket chain could also attract bids from other companies, including Amazon.
As North American consumers begin to adjust to the next normal, McKinsey, a global and prestigious consultancy, anticipate that the landscape of winners and losers in grocery will cease to be determined by format.
Axfood acquires Bergendahl's wholesale business and one tenth of City Gross. A transaction of SEK 2.5 billion with full call option exercise.
It is no secret that Aldi Denmark has been under pressure for many years, and that the money has flowed out, while the German owners have poured new capital into the discount chain - a total of around DKK 4 billion, according to Børsen, a newspaper.
Asia remains a major growth opportunity for FMCG businesses, particularly in the short term, consultancy IGD concludes in a new report.
Women are leading the way in the transition to a sustainable food system and real flavors are taking place among the substitutes. These are among the conclusions in this year's future report from ICA, "Growing Together".
Denmark's largest grocery group, Salling Group, came out of 2020 with the best underlying result and the highest turnover ever. CEO Per Bank believes in even more growth in top and bottom line.
Tesco profits dive 20% despite surging grocery sales during pandemic. The pre-tax profits tumbled by almost 20 per cent to £ 825 million over the past year, despite big increases in turnover.
As the first store chain in Denmark, Salling-owned Netto is now testing how climate labeling of grocery purchases can work. This is done in a pilot test in two selected stores, where signage and labeling of the products will guide customers to the less climate-damaging alternatives.
Next autumn, the US-based chain Costco will open its first Swedish store in Arninge, Täby, north of Stockholm. A contract with the property owner Trophi for premises of 13,000 square meters is ready, confirms CEO Jan Björk.
Annual results released by Morrisons last week confirm that while its sales have benefitted from surging demand in supermarkets over the last year, profits have taken a major hit from costs related to operating its business during the pandemic.
Rema 1000 is now perceived as the most sustainable brand in Denmark, new research shows. For the past three years, the grocery group Coop has been the most sustainable brand in Denmark. Now it is Rema.
With a new concept, Reitan Convenience in Sweden hope to create the world's greenest convenience/grocery store, claims Mariette Kristenson, CEO of Reitan Convenience Sweden.
The massive private Thai group, Charoen Pokphand, rebrands all former Tesco stores in Malaysia and Thailand to Lotus’s. No more Tesco in Thailand and Southeast Asia.
In 2019 Denmark's largest grocery group, Salling Group, said goodbye to the Swedish market with the divestment of a total of 163 Netto stores, which were sold to the Swedish company CBS for almost DKK 1 billion.
The Swedish giant, ICA, disappoints the market at the end of the year and the stock exchange sends the share values down by about 0,4 percent. The reason is that ICA is growing slower than the market, hence losing market share in a market that is growing strongly due to the Corona pandemic.
Amazon recently announced that the company is expanding the rollout of its biometric palm scanning system to more of its branded stores, allowing customers to pay with nothing but their hands.
Driving online profitability, creating safe shopping spaces, and bringing the out-of-home experience in-home are among the key trends expected to shape global retail in 2021, according to new predictions from IGD.
Labor Minister Elisabeth Borne gives a clear message that she is against a takeover of French retailer Carrefour by Canadian convenience-store operator Alimentation Couche-Tard.
The owner of the Circle K petrol station chain, Canadian Alimentation Couche-Tard, is offering $ 20 billion for the world's second largest grocery chain - French Carrefour SA. That is about 30 percent above current capitalized values in Carrefour.
Alibaba's founder, Jack Ma, has gone missing after he publicly criticized China's financial system and called for reforms.
It is reason to believe that food prices in UK will rise modestly in the wake of Brexit because food import and export regulations are very similar to the situation ex ante Brexit.
Denmark's largest grocery group, Salling Group, was extremely busy in 2020 and increased its turnover at an unprecedented rate.
The Norwegian Competition Authority is cracking down hard on the use of “price spies” in the major grocery chains in the Norwegian market and warns of a possible fine of NOK 21 billion to NorgesGruppen, Coop and The Reitan Group combined.
The Swedish grocery giant ICA reports accelerating online growth so far in 2020, not least driven by Covid19. Turnover at the store level is also increasing for the same reason.
Tesco has announced that it expects to complete the £8bn sale of its businesses in Thailand and Malaysia to the CP Group within days.
The world’s biggest grocery retailer, Walmart, is among the many grocery retailers that scores high on Covid19. The retail giant delivered a positive surprise despite analysts' optimism about its performance.
Consumer goods giant Unilever will trial a four-day working week in New Zealand to enhance worker wellbeing and boost productivity.
Singapore's Grab has not changed its thinking regarding a future IPO because of COVID-19, according to its president, Ming Maa.
U.S retailer Walmart Inc has agreed to sell most of Japanese supermarket chain Seiyu to the investment firm KKR and e-commerce company Rakuten in a deal that values Seiyu at $ 1.65 billion (172.5 billion yen).
Walmart has dropped plans to use roving robots to scan shelves and keep track of inventory, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Covid19 is a plague and a nuisance for everyone. However, for the grocery retail business it has led to strong growth and increased profitability because people do not eat out anymore. It is more important to note that the Corona is also pushing forward new technological solutions in the value chain.
Supermarket shelves are empty of French products in Kuwait City in a protest of cartoons in the French media illustrating the Prophet Mohammed. The protests are spreading at an alarming rate to all Muslim countries.
The Issa brothers and TDR Capital - a private equity firm - acquire majority ownership stake in the supermarket chain ASDA from US retail giant Walmart.
Lidl is scrapping plans to launch into online grocery in the UK as it closes its digital logistics arm and declares to focus on bricks-and-mortar business.
Tesco increases shareholder payouts as half-year profit soars increases 28.7% to £551 million, mainly due to Corona! *
The reason is that the strong success of Rema 1000's in Denmark is now being copied by rivals.
The American grocery chain Walmart will employ 20,000 seasonal workers to handle e-commerce, and important autumn stunts such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping.
The retail giant and the drone company will start trials in early 2021.
Iceland, the British frozen discount grocer hires 3000 new workers amid online boom. Trial with food delivery platform Uber Eats has also been launched in London, with plans for a larger rollout if successful.
Executive Vice President Kræn Østergård Nielsen has been appointed CEO of Coop Denmark. Thus, the Danish grocery giant has found a replacement for its longtime CEO Peter Høgsted
The online giant Amazon is expanding and has ordered almost 2,000 green vans for the European market.
Coop is rebuilding 13 of its Fakta stores, which in future will be called Coop 365. The ambition is to take market shares from Lidl and Rema 1000.
