Improving Food sales, Travel hitting records & the Plunkett Foundation

Firstly, can I thank all of you who have posted your feedback on the announcement regarding the extension of enhanced discounts. It’s good to hear how important this is, and I hope you can make good use of the discounts as we head towards some of our key seasonal events. To find out more click here.

I am really pleased to see improved results across our Food business with a strong finish to the financial year and a good start this week to the next. Our newest store at Badbury Park in Swindon also beat expectations in its first full trading week, which is fantastic news.

Food sales like for like, are now pushing up over 5% and every one of our districts beat targets in the last week so well done to all!

That’s not all, in Travel, they have recovered from a slow start after Christmas, to pick up significantly with net revenue for the period at above £7m up against forecast. The performance was driven by consistent demand for high-value bookings as well as a reduction trend in cancellations. Mainstream holiday sales have also been in high demand and we are still seeing strong growth for both Long haul and cruise sales with respective passenger growth at 151% and 27%. Again, a big well done to the teams.

As we begin a new Society year, these results have been achieved against a continued backdrop of the cost-of-living challenges affecting consumer spending along with increasing business costs. Navigating through these obstacles really does present a big challenge in meeting our targets for the year ahead but I am confident we can continue to grow. Let’s keep it up.

Pharmacy business

As mentioned previously the Society’s Board had made the difficult decision to cease trading our online pharmacy and prescription services business. This operation has now closed, and I wanted to offer my personal thanks and best wishes to the 11 colleagues who were affected by this decision. Each of them gave their full support throughout the process and have been a credit to the Society throughout. I am sure colleagues will join me in wishing them the very best for the future. 

Providing support to the Plunkett Foundation

We work with many groups and foundations, to ultimately make lives better. So, one I would like to highlight is the Plunkett Foundation. A community-owned business, they are a charity that supports people in rural areas to set up and run a wide range of businesses which are genuinely owned by local communities, whereby members have equal and democratic control. Only last year we supported the group with a donation towards a new community training hub in Woodstock, Oxford, a charity we are proud to partner with.

As they continue to help and set up community-owned businesses, energy has become a big topic for many businesses with the rising cost of gas and electricity. That’s why yesterday, Mike Pickering, our Head of Sustainability presented an informative energy-saving workshop alongside ETS (Energy and Technical Services) in partnership with the Foundation to provide energy-saving advice to community stores and community pubs. With 20 community retail businesses attending the session, this is just one of the activities we are involved in and moving forward pledge to support them by enabling the creation of new Co-ops. This example just showcases how important Co-ops are and the great work we do to contribute to the wider co-operative movement.

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