New ideas to freshen up Tesco

nEW IDEAs To fREshEn uP

In the past two decades Tesco has been making great efforts to maintain its successful operation in Hungary. Edina Beale reports on some of the latest changes that were made by Tesco in Hungary to improve customer service, as well as bringing attention to their latest schemes to mitigate food waste and discussing a new project to popularise Hungarian wine in the UK.

British retail giant Tesco entered Hungary in 1994 when it acquired a small local supermarket group, S-Market, based in north-west Hungary. In 1996, Tesco opened the first hypermarket in Budapest. With 206 stores across Hungary, today it serves fresh food to 3 million customers every week on average.

Throughout the past two decades Tesco has put great emphasis on its strong customer focus and is constantly examining changing customer habits in order to improve its services. Its most recent move to stay in harmony with the latest trends has been to make some changes in the operation of the bakery and fresh food counters. More and more Tesco stores in Hungary are now set to bring in partially-baked products instead of making them from scratch in their in- house bakery, while some of the fresh food counters will be operated by external partners in the future.

Supplier Network

In August last year Tesco also successfully developed and introduced its new Supplier Network interactive platform, which represents a new approach to its European and international suppliers in marking cooperation, innovation and sustainability. Through the Supplier Network, its partners are able to discuss the hidden opportunities and challenges in providing products that are produced to outstanding quality standards, at the best price value and originate from a sustainable environment. All members of the Network are able to get in contact with Tesco employees and other suppliers in order to learn from each other’s experiences.

Fighting food waste

Tesco in Hungary has been working with the Hungarian Food Bank Association since 2014 in order to fight against food waste. Its food saving programme involves colleagues in the stores collecting, sorting and giving away products that are no longer saleable but are still good enough to consume. These donations, which normally include vegetables, fruit and baked goods, are given to local people in need.

This programme has been continuously expanded and 2017 was an outstanding record year in various respects. The number of Tesco stores that took part in this programme has passed 100, and once the first supermarkets and express stores joined it had increased to 139 by the end of the year. In 2017, Tesco donated 6745 tonnes of food to charity, which is nearly two and half times more than in the previous year.

Another important tool to combat food waste was also introduced last year when Tesco launched the Perfectly Imperfect supply, which helps suppliers to reduce waste by accepting fruit and vegetables that may not have a perfect look or shape but are still faultless in terms of quality. Since the start of this programme more than 600,000kg of produce has been saved from the dump. In the beginning, this programme was running at only 12 stores in Hungary, but due to the positive customer feedback in autumn 2017 Tesco rolled it out across 12 hypermarkets and from the beginning of 2018 the programme has been running in 148 stores, including supermarkets. Apart from the availability of the supply, the ‘wonky’ fruit and vegetable product range has also been gradually extended. Besides apples, carrots and potatoes, hypermarkets also have a constant supply of ‘imperfect’ avocados, garlic and sweet potato, as well as seasonal vegetables and fruits.

Hungarian wine in uK stores

With some 22 wine regions and numerous wine ranges, Hungarian wine fans have trouble classifying the variety on offer. In order to make this easier and to popularise Hungarian wine on an international scale, the Wine Concept umbrella brand was created, which presents 18 different type of bottled wine from five wine regions (Balaton, Eger, Szekszárd, Tokaj, Villány) under one name.

The aim of the Hungarian National Trading House, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Tesco and the Wine Concept Zrt strategic cooperation is to boost exports of Hungarian wine and to establish a sustainable business model. The project will also demonstrate how well and efficiently the government can work with market players (traders and producers) in order to achieve a strategic goal. As a result of this cooperation, since September 2017 12 per cent of the Hungarian wine being sold in the Czech, Polish and Slovak Tesco stores were from the Wine Concept supply, and this is more than 170,000 bottles of wine; while since the beginning of the cooperation the quantity sold has reached half a million bottles. Now the retail store is ready to take the next step and extend the Wine Concept products to the UK: from April 2018 the umbrella brand can be found on shelves in the British Tesco stores. n