Tesco 2011 Annual Report Download - page 22

REAL FOOD
This year, we launched the
Tesco Real food magazine.
The monthly publication, which
is available for free in our stores,
provides customers with recipes,
cooking tips, information on
healthy eating and updates on
new Tesco products. The magazine
has become Britain’s largest food
title with a circulation of 1.2 million.
Real food can be found online at
www.tescorealfood.com. With
over 1,000 recipes and a food
blog, the site gets 2.2 million
page views per month.
We’ve also launched an
innovative service for customers
to receive great recipes via SMS.
Customers are able to send a text
message including two or three
key ingredients and in return
receive an automatic reply with
a delicious recipe suggestion.
2,000
Over 2,000 new and improved
products
10m
Self-service transactions
per week
Stores
New space has continued to drive sales growth. We’ve opened over
200 new stores in 2010/11 and have a strong opening programme
for the coming year.
We have seen particularly strong growth in our convenience format,
Tesco Express, with over 150 new stores and have achieved significant
share gain in the convenience sector. This growth follows our work to
tailor the range and promotions in Express to better suit the needs
of our customers locally. Overall last year, we had 80 million more
customer visits to our Express stores than in 2009/10.
We have also refreshed or extended over 400 stores this year, receiving
a great response from customers. For example, we’ve added 7,000 sq ft
to Wembley Extra, expanding our World Foods offer to meet better the
needs of customers in the local area – the store is outperforming
by 16% and over three-quarters of customers have told us that it is
greatly improved.
Range
Our customers tell us that quality is increasingly important to them,
it is not simply about finding the cheapest product. We have
stepped up our emphasis on quality, with accelerated product
development, leading to the introduction of over 2,000 new and
improved food products.
The increasing importance of quality for customers is also supported
by the strong performance of our Finest range, which has outpaced
the growth of other areas of our food range, with a 6.3% increase
in sales this year.
Many of our customers want to buy locally sourced products to support
their local communities. We are always looking to expand our network
of good local suppliers and to support them in building capacity to grow
their businesses and supply us at a national level.
We have five dedicated regional buying offices throughout the UK and
in 2010/11 we increased sales of local products to £1 billion, up from
£850 million in 2009/10. Tesco is the first UK retailer to launch a website
dedicated to local foods, at www.tesco.com/local.
We’ve also worked more closely with farmers and growers to increase
the amount of British produce in-store. This year, for example, we sold
over 40% more British apples and pears.
Price
We remain focused on delivering the best value to all customers.
The launch of Essential Savings in May was an investment in lower
prices on the everyday products which our customers buy. We have
introduced more multi-buys into the promotion programme to help
customers save money. We also launched our Price Check initiative this
year. Price Check enables customers to check the price of individual
products and the total price of their shopping online. When we compare
our customers’ baskets with Asda’s prices, nearly 80 per cent are the
same price or cheaper in Tesco than they would be in Asda. Together
these initiatives have helped us to maintain our leading position in a
highly competitive market and to encourage customers to switch to
Tesco throughout the year.
18 — TESCO PLC Annual Report and Financial Statements 2011
BUSINESS REVIEW
Growing the UK core