What the hell is going on at Tesco?

It's not been the best of years for the supermarket giant. From the horsemeat scandal to food waste, we ask what's going on at Tesco.

What a year it's been for the UK's largest retailer! For those of you who enjoy a drop of schadenfreude, here's what's happened so far...

• In December last year it pulled out of America, offloading all its 'Fresh and Easy' stores at a cost of around £1.5bn. 
• In January it got burned in the horsemeat scandal - it's saying something when McDonald's is the good guy. 
• In March it bought Giraffe and had to think about how to fit them into their current stores. 
• In a sweltering July it put the price of bottled water up 40%.
• It owns 49% of new coffee chain Harris and Hoole, launched in August. The firm's 'independent' branding got some folks annoyed.
• Then in September things went nuts: it launched a tablet (the Hudl) and announced it's hiring 100 computer programmers. Is it trying to take on tech giants?
• They (with others) had to pull a 'mental patient' fancy dress costume from stores.
• Forced to issue their first profit warning in 20 years, one analyst wryly observed: 'UK like-for-like sales, excluding petrol, fell by 0.5% - a woeful performance for Tesco's core market' (UK sales make up three quarters of its business).

Finally, this week Tesco published their food waste figures (here's the report), which makes for interesting reading: 28,500 tonnes of food thrown away in the first six months of 2013. After all that, I imagine CEO Philip Clarke will be praying for a good Christmas. 

All things to all shoppers

Back in the Noughties, there used to be a theory that Tesco was winning because it was all things to all men. It had a value range, own brand, and Finest* selection; but now the latest market data reveals that Tesco is continuing to lose market share both to discounters such as Aldi and Lidl, and to quality experts like Waitrose.

Too big, and a bit too scruffy

We've apparently fallen out of love with the massive out-of-town shopping centre. This is bad news for Tesco, as they spent most of the 1990s building huge shops, selling everything from TVs to TV dinners. CEO Philip Clarke has called an end to that expansion. Also with so many garish BOGOF and promo signs in the shops, the visual noise of walking around a large supermarket is enough to give you a migraine. 

Wasters

However, it is the latest waste figures that show just how bad things are. Those 38,500 tonnes represent just 0.87% of what Tesco sold in the same time period. How much of your weekly shop have you wasted in the last six months? The biggest offender was bagged salad (an environmental disaster), with 68% being wasted. Tesco crunch that figure like this:-

• Field losses 17%
• Processing loses 7%
• Retail waste 1%
• Consumer losses 35%

We, the consumer, are throwing away 35%! Following bagged salad is bakery (47%), then apples and bananas both at 40% each. What's particularly bad about these last two is that they're often imports. So bananas from South America and apples from South Africa or New Zealand travel half way around the world to end up as animal feed for livestock, or worse, in landfill.

And what have we come to when processors, supermarkets and consumers throw away tonnes of food while families using food banks have tripled in the last year? According to Wrap the amount of food waste produced by UK households had fallen by 1.1 million tonnes in 2007 to 7.2 million tonnes in 2011. But of that, 4.4 million tonnes was usable food. Let he without sin cast the first stone…

And right around the corner is Christmas, which usually ends in a mass of over consumption, excess weight, waste, debt and a hangover. 

What do you think of Tesco's waste figures? Talk to us in the comments box below.

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