It's Kantar day!

But I'm on a train. Inflation is running at 14.6%.

But we have a fall in the inflation number!

of 0.1%

I am writing a fuller response to the wider Jack Monroe elements for the food industry.

It seems that an observation on Asda's decision making around entry level products/ranges is being repackaged as general commentary about the supermarkets robbing everyone blind. Asda reducing Smartprice ranges is no huge surprise, they have talked for a long time about this as part of their strategy.

Talk of a 40% cut in ranges via End2End strategy.

3k lines from their range = removed last year (Dec 2020) for example. (thegrocer.co.uk/ranging-and-me…)

The inflation thread via @BootstrapCook is interesting it brings in to focus some of the ranging decisions undertaken by a retailer around their value tier.

But it doesn't expand across the sector in the same way, so because of where one shops, you can be caught in the crossfire Whoever Jack shops with look to have removed a number of value tier products to "engineer" value. Perhaps price matching with Aldi on a set of products, they remove others from the range so they can't compare and customers are forced to trade upwards to mid tier?

Kantar day coming shortly Grocery sales -5.1%

Nice to see there's still plenty of money in the public sector:

Bradford - approved £5.5m for the development of an Advance Fuel Centre and the replacement of vehicles with compressed gas variants. To be funded by fuel cost savings and additional income from sales. I like to think the principles of our work - pragmatism, truth-telling and reality of the situation, apply to all areas, not just retail.

Not in writing reports that show your target is getting further away, and worsening.....

So after a brief break from our revolutionary Kantar via the medium of animated gifs. We are back: Sales growth fro the market was up to 18.9% from 17.2% for 4 weeks to 14th June.

As the @Grocery_Insight image portal/server/best practice (name TBC) launch becomes near reality. A reminder that we have a huge amount of imagery to showcase everything (Tesco, amongst many, many others). Register your interest here: groceryinsight.com/grocery-insigh… Often, I think people forget how bad Tesco was. The accounting scandal is 'top of mind' but the reality is that the stores were a mess, pricing abysmal and the message was confused (being polite.) Here, from our archive: (2014!)

Sainsbury's slides: 1) A slide to show that whilst sales were resilient, actually we've left the back door open and the competitors have caught up. 2) Kantar market share shows Retailer A/B/C (akin to Dave Lewis at Tesco) and a loss of share for 'big four' equal to gain by discount. Although Kantar is skewed by discount store opening programme. (data is year end 24th Feb).

There will be lots of noise tomorrow re: Jack's. Rome wasn't built in a day and I sense this is a longer term play. Rumours galore already; we do know that there will be Jack's branded lines in the range. Whether that means some of the tertiary discount value lines are also in, or instead of, remains to be seen.