In The News

David Sables, CEO, and the Sentinel Team appear regularly on and in various media, commentating and giving insight on industry issues. David is a regular columnist within ‘the Grocer’ magazine, as well as being a contributor to Forbes.

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The discounter freight train has got up a head of steam and is cruising past the competition to record shares. Supermarket volumes last month fell year on year for the first time since 2014 and we also have underlying deflation in retail prices. All of the top four lost market share during the past 12-week reporting period, with soft discounters Asda and Morrisons hit worst. Meanwhile, Aldi is up 22.6%... Read More

Selling in grocery is not just selling a product or a promotion - it includes selling a plan and sometimes a vision. In some categories and customers there has been an overnight change in buyer style to one of collaboration, which has stumped and mystified some suppliers, as they’d grown used to surviving the transactional game. Actually, it just proves what an act all the tough stuff is. It’s a... Read More

The YouGov survey this week reported improvement across the board on retailer collaborative measures versus one year ago. The GCA team is delighted with the gradual progress, recognising there is still a lot to do and that we must not take our foot off the gas. Do remember though that across the same year a major event has rocked this whole arena. The Tesco scandal was so widely covered that... Read More

In the late 1990s, changes in EU and UK competition law demanded that suppliers stopped influencing or dictating retail pricing. When a buyer moaned about the margin on products, the supplier response changed to an awkward dialogue for a while: “Err I’m sure you’re not errr suggesting that I should express influence over your retail price coz that’s errr….” Yet now everyone gets it - suppliers know how to handle... Read More

Waitrose is planning a bold makeover of its loyalty card scheme by allowing consumers to choose which products they receive promotional offers on. The ‘Pick Your Own Offers’ scheme, which is currently being trialled at five Waitrose stores, will give shoppers armed with a myWaitrose card a long list of branded and own-label products to select their favourite 10 items from. They will then receive 20% off each of those products... Read More

OK, so are we are all agreed discounter share growth holds risks for UK consumers and suppliers as well as the obvious threat to retailers? Shoppers walk their way blindly into a world of low choice and suspect imports, while suppliers feel the knock-on effect of the price wars with a doubling of those in significant financial distress, not to mention the scandalous brand rip-offs. It’s not going to stop... Read More

Our CEO David Sables attended the Westminter Food & Nutrition Forum Keynote Seminar and had the opportunity to speak with Alex Simpson. Transcript Lord Cameron of Dillington Yes, any questions from the floor. David Sables: Sentinel Management Consultants. We help suppliers to be some of the few who manage to cope under the pressure from the buyers and one of the major challenges that Christine Tacon has is suppliers not... Read More

Adjudicator Christine Tacon is to call on thousands of suppliers to help her root out “notorious” buyers who have been systematically breaching the Groceries Code. On Monday, Tacon will start contacting an estimated 8,000 suppliers asking them to take part in a YouGov survey on their relationship with retailers and urging them to point the finger at individual buying teams. A previous survey last year was hit by poor uptake... Read More

Analysts saying the supers must ‘drop their prices’ to compete is mildly irritating. Dalton Philips proved that retailers funding price cuts with the same operation reduces profit and compounds the problem. Too much stock tied up in extended ranges means that to compete with discounters this way they’d halve their ROI - shareholders will have a problem with that. Dave Lewis gets it though: cut the range, cut the stock... Read More

Decisions over the future of thousands of lines at Tesco are being left in the hands of management consultants, suppliers warned this week. The Grocer can reveal the UK's biggest retailer has tasked Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to conduct a range review across 40 categories, with a view to reducing its SKU count by up to a third, with Tesco set to press the 'reset' button at the end of... Read More