Visiting Coops & Our Leadership Conference

Visiting Coops

I have been visiting a number of other Co-operatives over the past week. These have included Chelmsford Star, which is part of our travel consortium and also takes services from the Phone Coop, so an important partner. Most of their retail stores are in and around Chelmsford and Braintree, in Essex, and their local food range is bannered under ‘the only way is local’! Does that sound familiar?

I also visited our closest neighbouring Societies, Tamworth and the Heart of England, which is a small co-operative headquartered in Coventry. I met with their CEO Ali Kurji and whilst there he invited me to take a seat in a special chair in his office which was presented by the employees to the management Executive some 60 years ago in recognition of hitting £1000 in sales at the half year stage! I can’t wait to see what you all come up with when we reach £2 Billion in turnover!

Heart of England's Special Chair

 

Meeting the Heart of England CEO Ali Kurji 

 

Leadership conference

It was wonderful to join with members of the leadership team at a one-day conference, hosted by the Hillside Brewery. And before you get the wrong impression our HR team wouldn’t allow anyone to have the slightest tipple whilst on duty! Hillside Brewery are an important local supplier to us and have a great facility. As part of my Connected Future strategy I am keen to build stronger relationships with our numerous suppliers and it makes sense to make use of their facilities rather than simply paying for hotels or conference centres. It also helps to raise the profile of our local food suppliers and gave them a chance to showcase their great products and also describe how much work they have done to protect the environment in their production techniques.

The leadership team were given updates on our ‘Developing Young People’ agenda, colleague survey results, our diversity & inclusion policy and had a session on how to use Zoom. For my contribution, I reflected with them on my first 100 days as CEO and talked about some of the important opportunities and challenges ahead.

Beki Brain & Rachel Seagrave getting stuck in at the Leadership Conference

 

Breakfast on me

You may recall in one of my early blogs that I invited colleagues to put their names forward for a chance to join me for breakfast and have a chat. Well the lucky winner was Andrew Taylor who is our Food store manager at Finchfield. We had a great discussion about all things retail, children and Wolverhampton Wanders FC, his home town team. We met at Goodwin’s at in Tettenhall, if you have never been there you can have a full English breakfast for less than a fiver and look at great views across the City of Wolverhampton!

Andrew getting ready for his full english breakfast 

 

Christmas arrives at Chipping Norton

On Tuesday evening our Chipping Norton colleagues put on a mouth-watering Christmas Showcase for our local members. The event was hosted by David Hughes and his store team, who put on a fantastic showing to the local community filled with festive inspirations and locally sourced food and drink to try. Simon Woodhouse, our guest chef, was able to cook a mouth-watering menu that included a three course taster meal for all customers to try.

The event showcased the very best in our Chipping Norton recipes and featured our Best of Our Counties range. For starters there was a locally inspired prawn cocktail in a glass with a salad dressing or a smoked salmon and beetroot carpaccio.

This was followed by our very own Homegrown Headline Act also billed as ‘The Showstopper’ - an Adlington Farm’s award-winning deliciously succulent turkey, suffused with the moreish flavours of Pearson’s dry cider, apple and pear.

For dessert there was a zesty panettone stack with Seville orange gin cream which was decorated with a delicate brown sugar lattice creation conjured up by our Chef Simon taking inspiration from the nest of a Bower Bird. Masterchef eat your heart out!

Chef Simon's Panettone Bower Bird Nest

The real Bower Bird nest 

 

That's all from me for another week. As always I'd love to hear any thoughts or ideas on anything I've discussed in the blog, so feel free to comment in the section below.