Coles chief Leah Weckert says grocery store | Australian Markets
Coles boss Leah Weckert says the grocery giant is harnessing the facility of artificial intelligence to handle provide chain complications as she insists competitors within the grocery store sector was “very vigorous”.
Her feedback on Friday got here as she braces for the release of the competitors regulator’s report into the grocery store sector.
Ms Weckert — together with bosses from rivals Woolworths, Metcash and Aldi — fronted the Australian Competitors and Shopper Fee’s grocery store inquiry hearings late final 12 months.
The ACCC’s remaining report into its year-long inquiry into the grocery store sector was delivered to Treasury on the finish of February, though it’s not clear when the Federal Authorities will release the findings.
Whereas she doesn’t know what’s within the report, Ms Weckert on Friday mentioned she was anticipating new guidelines and proposals round provider relationships and pricing transparency.
“I think the other big topics will probably be supplier arrangements. And so I think there’ll be some recommendations, particularly around fresh produce and getting more transparency for producers around price and volume,” she advised The Australian’s International Meals Discussion board in Melbourne.
“I think the other big one will be around pricing and pricing transparency.
“Potentially, we’ll be in a place where there’ll be recommendations to put up signage in-store to indicate when a product has gone through shrinkflation, we may need to have certain minimum font sizes for unit pricing, publishing prices online . . . to make it much easier for the customer to compare prices.”
Ms Weckert pointed to a record of large international gamers — like Costco and Amazon — who’ve are available in over the previous 15 years and considerably modified the market’s competitiveness.
Ms Weckert advised the discussion board that “competition in the grocery sector in Australia is very vigorous”.
“We also are competing with thousands of small retailers as well, so think fresh produce stores, butchers, bakers and what’s really interesting in Australia is a lot of those sit right out the front of our stores,” she mentioned.
“And in the last few years we’ve also seen, in the non-food space, entrants like Bunnings in pet and cleaning (products), you’ve seen Chemist Warehouse and Priceline start to move into areas like toilet paper and laundry and the like.”
Ms Weckert additionally highlighted Coles’ use of AI, information analytics and course of mapping, which particulars every step within the provide chain.
“It’s really about getting products through faster and this is one of the big things with supply shocks,” she mentioned of the method mapping, pointing to the instance of the hen flu outbreaks which have led to an egg scarcity.
“One of the big things that we have worked on is, given the reduction and amount of eggs we’ve got in the system, how do we just flow through what we have much faster.
“I think increasingly you’re going to see AI-driven tool become more available, more cost effective to be able to use for a variety of different purposes.”
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