Category: Question

The simple truth is that to deliver more competitive prices and keep products on shelves, we needed a single private label program. But not just any private label program, a quality program that has been rigorously tested over many years.

From a business perspective, it didn’t make sense to manage competing programs and products. Plus there were some stipulations as part of the acquisition that required us to make changes.

A significant amount of work went into reviewing all the private labels products to ensure we were bringing the “best of the best” into our new consolidated private label lineup, including customer favourites such as Lucerne, Best Buy Cheese and Edwards Coffee. While we did in-store sampling and demos and promoted items extensively in the weekly flyer, we could have done more to better explain the changes to employees and customers.

So if customers ask about the private label change, let them know we have built a consolidated program that incorporates the “best of” the former Safeway private label and are happy to have them sample any product they’d like.

And let them know we are constantly evolving and refining the products we are offering. Our products will continue to change with their tastes.

We are proud of our national private label program and want it to be the best store brand in the country. It’s up to us to collectively make that happen.

This has been a complaint from customers and from employees. We understand how frustrating it is to have a customer unhappy, and we should have done better.

Consolidating Sobeys and Safeway operations proved to be more challenging than we anticipated and resulted in some unintended consequences on the shelves. As part of the integration, we had to completely redo the technology that runs our stores but we’ve made significant progress and there should be noticeable improvements in your stores now that new tools are in place like CAO (Computer Assisted Ordering) and FIM (Fresh Inventory Management).

These tools have helped us work through many of our out-of-stock problems and are now creating efficiencies in how we work, but we recognize there is more to be done. We continue to refine our process in the back shop and in our regional supply chains and vendor relationships. Through Project Sunrise, we are currently in the process of simplifying our structure to allow our office teams to operate more efficiently and make better, faster decisions that will ultimately benefit our stores, our employees and customers

We are also investing in new technology to help us do this. We’re very excited by the automated warehouse that, once fully functional, will service our stores in Western Canada starting in June and bring some significant benefits to our stores. Store-friendly pallets will soon arrive, built with products from the same aisles, making it easier and faster for teams to unload weekly deliveries. It’s the final piece of our consolidated distribution network that will make sure you get the items in your stores when customers need them. You’ll be hearing more about this in the next few months.