AN INDUSTRY wit has dubbed the Coles Supermarket business in Australia ‘TesColes’.
This follows the migration to Australia in recent years of a clutch of Tesco UK ‘turn around specialists’ intent on carving a path into the strong market lead enjoyed by the fresh food people at Woolworths.
Mirroring the Tesco UK model, Coles has taken curious animal ‘welfare’ positions this year that have caught the attention of media, regulators and food producers in a range of sectors from dairy, through beef, chooks and eggs and most recently pork. There is more to come.
The Tesco formula determines that you play to your audience’s ‘perceptions’ and not to its intelligence. Last week, Tesco announced in the British media that it would not be selling meat derived from Australian lambs that had been mulesed.
Problem with that claim, according to one industry observer, is that lambs destined for the Sunday roast are never mulesed. Merinos produced to grow wool are mulesed to protect them from the horrors of flystrike.
UK expat and Coles Australia’s quality, policy and governance manager Jackie Healing told an Animal Welfare Science Centre conference this month that, in the supermarket, there’s a difference between ‘science and the perception of what is safe and legal’.
Jackie told her audience that welfare was an important niche for Coles. “If you link welfare to a perception, you’ll drive sales,” she said. “No doubt about it.”
Thus Coles says it has given us ‘hormone free’ beef (an oxymoron and misleading), sow stall free pork and free-range poultry and they promise cage free eggs by 2013.
Jackie Healing dwelt particularly on the ‘trust’ that Coles’ 13 million customers each week have in the chain’s fresh food position. The intelligence that feeds the customer trust thesis is largely determined by consumer market research carried out by Coles.
‘TesColes’ has three enduring market dilemmas in respect of its perception-driven welfare stance. These are:
· While a staggering 60 plus per cent of consumers wrongly perceived for more than 40 years that chicken meat contained administered hormones, sales in Australia rose from 6kg a head in 1965 to a staggering 37kg a head last year. And growing.
· While market research is very important, if you let it run your business, it’s likely to run right over you.
· Most importantly, ethically any position of ‘trust’ in any relationship must be driven by the truth and not by ‘perceptions’, commercial dissembling and outright bullshit. Trust without truth is an empty vessel.
Mike Cahill
0407 213 430.
Jackie Healing’s speech ‘Retail Trends in Animal Welfare’ is available as an audio file at http://www.vimeo.com/26305856