Travel Announcement, Our New Stores & Pulse Survey

Travel Announcement

 

On Wednesday I was pleased to announce that we have entered into an agreement with Central England Co-operative to transfer its travel retail business including 16 high street branches and the colleagues who work in them to Midcounties.

This deal represents the third major transaction by Co-op Midcounties in the last 12 months to expand our core businesses, following the purchase of four Warner's Budgens food stores in the Cotswolds and three Childcare nurseries in the North East in late 2019.

It helps us to consolidate our position as the UK's leading co-operative travel group and is an example of the wider co-operative movement working together to reduce costs, whilst continuing to offer co-operative solutions to members' travel needs.

Travel is core to our long-term strategy and when we learned that Central England Co-operative was looking to emphasise its focus on other divisions and move away from Travel, we wanted to take the opportunity to bring these branches under the Midcounties retail umbrella and further strengthen our offering. With our scale and expertise, we look forward to helping grow and nurture the former Central England Co-operative branches to ensure their success in the future.

 

Moreton-in-Marsh off to a great start

Following the launch of our new look store in Moreton-in-Marsh last week, it was great to see that it was so well received by the local community and got off to a flying start, with sales of over £76,000 in the first three days, of which £10,000 was in local food, putting it in the top 3 stores for local sales.  We also had over 200 members join us and I am sure that we will see many more with such a brilliant store. Well done to the team. 

 

Botley Food Market opened its doors

 

Yesterday, we opened the doors on our new £1.6 million store in Botley, Oxford, which is a fantastic addition to our Food Market group.

The store has been built to the latest environmental specifications, including state-of-the-art energy-efficient refrigerators and has some innovations designed to reduce single-use plastics, such as a free water dispenser where customers can refill their own bottle and a "weigh your own" refillable station, offering customers the opportunity to buy products using a reusable container of their own, or purchased in-store. The refillable station features up to 27 different foods from Tree of Life the UK's largest wholesale distributor of healthy, natural and organic products – including nuts, porridge, rice and fruit.  Also, in-store is a self-service deli counter and members will even be able to enjoy a free cup of coffee every time they shop.

Thank you to all those involved, a great job.

You will be able to hear more about the store and the team next week as I will be handing over the reins of my blog to the store manager, Donna Hunter, who will be sharing her story and letting us know how the first week went.

 

Midcounties on a Global stage

Following an invitation from Bruno Roelants, Director-General of the International Co-operatives Alliance (ICA), our Chief Values Officer, Pete Westall and our Co-operative Social Responsibility Manager, Mike Pickering, participated in a joint webinar with the United Nations (UN) and the ICA to discuss Co-operative Climate Action.

I’m very proud of the brilliant work we are doing on tackling climate issues and so this was a great opportunity for us to talk about our fantastic 1Change programme, how we are putting our values into action and playing our part in the global support of co-ops to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

 

Pulse Survey

Finally, today is the last day of the current pulse survey.  These regular surveys help to inform the business and shape future decisions and so it's important that we hear from as many colleagues as possible to give us a broad range of views. So, if you haven't yet taken the opportunity to give us your view then I would encourage you to do so.

If you are not signed into Colleagues Connect already, this link will ask you to do so first. You will then be redirected to your notifications where you will see the link for your new pulse survey.

 

Sign in to complete your Pulse Survey