The company has a long history of supporting British farmers. Support goes beyond the stocking of products to working with farmers to help raise capacity, skills, and empowering them to build sustainable businesses. In November 2007 we became the first supermarket to use flour from guaranteed traceable UK farms in our 360 in-store bakeries by using top quality British wheat grown in East Anglia. Via the ‘Year of Food and Farming’ campaign, we are also helping to raise the profile of British agriculture. This is linked to Sainsbury’s Active Kids scheme by providing information and equipment to schools and this year we will be offering schools farm and store tours in partnership with suppliers in each of our key agricultural regions.
Sainsbury’s has sold Fairtrade goods since 1994 but the conversion of our bananas to Fairtrade, completed in July 2007, has made an enormous difference to Fairtrade farmers and their communities. By selling Fairtrade bananas at the same price as conventional bananas Sainsbury’s and its customers have helped create a social premium of circa £4 million in 2007 which will be returned to the growers and their communities. This is the biggest conversion of its kind worldwide and we now sell more Fairtrade bananas than all other major UK supermarkets combined with a market share in excess of 60 per cent.
To celebrate the 100 per cent conversion, in August 2007 we launched ‘The Sainsbury’s Fair Development Fund’. Run by Comic Relief and financed with an initial commitment of £1 million from Sainsbury’s, the fund will be used to support a number of Fairtrade initiatives over a four-year period. It is hoped the fund will provide a major boost to the livelihoods of producers, especially in Africa, who will be supported in entering the Fairtrade system.
In September 2007, 14 ‘Local Hero’ store colleagues visited Sainsbury’s Fairtrade producers in Kenya and Tanzania as acknowledgement of their charitable work and to gain better understanding of the products and the benefits provided to farmers, workers and communities. In October 2007, we announced that 100 per cent of our entire own brand tea would become Fairtrade, followed by roast and ground coffee. This is expected to triple the Fairtrade certified tea sold in the UK and create an increased return of around £2 million each year in Fairtrade premiums for developing countries. We have more than doubled our Fairtrade sales over the last year and when this move is completed at the end of 2010, we will be the UK’s largest retailer of Fairtrade tea and coffee.
Accelerating the growth of complementary non-food
Sainsbury’s values are just as relevant in non-food ranges as in food. Non-food products follow the same principles of quality, value and innovation and although food is at the heart of Sainsbury’s brand, the development of ranges such as clothing, home, electricals and entertainment is enabling us to complement the food shop and provide a broader offer for our customers.
TU, our own label clothing range which launched in September 2004, continues to be a star performer. We are now the eleventh largest UK clothing retailer by volume and during the past year sales have grown by around 40 per cent taking TU clothing to a £300 million brand. TU clothing is now in 270 of our stores but, with the full range still only in 74, there is significant potential to grow sales as TU is extended further across the store estate. TU’s in-house designers follow the same focus on quality and value while tracking the latest developments in fashion and clothing technology.
In March 2006 we launched a range of Fairtrade certified cotton clothing and sales of Fairtrade
t-shirts are significantly ahead of our expectations. In March 2008 we launched two new TU clothing ranges called ‘Grace’ in sizes 18 to 28 and ‘Petite’ catering for women 5ft 3in and under sized from 8 to 18. Each range consists of 45 items and is in 50 and 25 stores respectively.
The TU brand is now well established with Sainsbury’s customers and just as the ‘basics’ and ‘Ttd’ (via ‘Different by design’) sub brands have been applied to non-food products, a new 1,700 homeware range called ‘TU home’ was launched in two stores in Sydenham (London) and Oldbury (West Midlands) in April 2008. This completes our ‘good, better, best’ range hierarchy in non-food, as in our food ranges, and complements 1,700 home and lifestyle products, such as storage, home office and toys, already in our core non-food product range. This total offer of 3,400 items will be rolled out to additional stores over the next year.
We had a strong Christmas offer across gifts, cards and wrapping and was our first to be sourced direct by our in-house team. It also included a number of special buys and ‘stunt’ deals of large electrical products and we had a particularly strong performance in games, small electrical appliances and new technology such as MP3 players, digital cameras and satellite navigation systems. More recent product launches within our home and lifestyle offer include a children’s cookware range, designed to help encourage children to get cooking, and the expansion of our premium homeware range ‘Different by design’.
Our Health and Beauty ranges had a good year and 35 stores were refitted with a new look and layout for these products. We increased our promotional programme to include ‘stunt’ deals on products such as nappies and our Champneys skincare range saw its third year of consecutive growth with over two million products being sold. We had 222 pharmacies within our supermarkets at the end of March 2008. We recruited additional pharmacists to strengthen our team as well as assisting pharmacy colleagues to continue their professional development to continuously improve this area of service for customers. The first General Practitioners’ (“GP”) surgery to be located in a supermarket opened at one of our Manchester stores in March 2008. Designed to give patients convenient access to GP services during evenings and weekends, this initiative has generated interest nationwide from GPs and Primary Care Trusts.