Industry News

Criterion August 14, 2012 The Australian TURNING wheat into bread continues to prove a low-yield exercise for the hapless Goodman Fielder, but converting dough into pizzas is proving a far more lucrative proposition for the can-do-no-wrong Domino’s. Both operators have to be wary of soft commodity prices – especially for wheat – given the prospect of a disastrous drought-afflicted US harvest. Goodman Fielder (GFF, 50.5 cents) is taking a Churchill-esque approach to its turnaround task, offering more blood, sweat and tears as it chips away at its $100 million cost-cutting program. “We expect to see very challenged market conditions continue,” CEO Chris Delaney says. “Consumer confidence will remain subdued.” Beyond that, investors will have to wait for September 3 strategy day for the real outlook striptease. The custodian of brand such as Wonder White, Vogel’s and Helga’s, Goodman unveiled a $96.6 million normalised net profit, 28 per cent lower, with…

AAP August 14, 2012 DOMINO’S Pizza has posted a 26 per cent rise in full-year profit on stronger sales and rising store numbers. Its net profit of $26.9 million for the year to June 30 was up from $21.4 million in the previous year. Total sales were $805.3 million in the year to June, up eight per cent from the previous year. Domino’s added 62 stores in the year to June to 908. Same store sales, which takes out the impact of new stores on sales, grew by 6.5 per cent in the year to June. Chief executive Don Meij on Tuesday said new products and expansion into social media and online ordering contributed to the company’s profit growth. He forecast profit growth of about 15 per cent in the 2012/13 financial year, and said another 70 to 80 new stores would be opened. Online sales were expected to make…

August 14, 2012 The Age Food company Goodman Fielder has posted another full-year loss and says challenging trading conditions in the baking and spreads sector will continue. Goodman Fielder on Tuesday posted a net loss of $146.9 million for the year to June 30, but it’s a 12 per cent improvement on the previous year’s $166.7 million loss. The result was hurt by $267.2 million in pre-tax charges related to a major company restructure, plus write-downs on its Australian and New Zealand baking business and NZ home ingredients arm. Normalised profit, which takes out one-off financial items, was $96.5 million in the year to June, down 29 per cent on $135.2 million in the previous year. Goodman Fielder makes bread, spreads and supplies edible fats and oils to other manufacturers. Its brands include White Wings and Meadow Lea. The company’s restructure involved 600 redundancies and bakery closures. Chief executive Chris…

NACS Daily News August 13 2012 HERTFORDSHIRE, England – Tesco wants to make sure busy travelers don’t come home to an empty fridge. Last week at Gatwick Airport, Tesco revealed the U.K.’s first interactive virtual grocery store in airport’s North Terminal. The Gatwick opening builds on Tesco’s launch of the world’s first virtual store in South Korea last year, an innovation that generated 25 million online posts around the globe. The Korean virtual store allowed commuters to shop in subways and at bus stops by pointing their mobile phones at billboards. Tesco is now testing the concept for the first time in the U.K., but this time using interactive digital displays. The Gatwick virtual store allows passengers passing through the North Terminal to combine browsing, as they would in a physical store, with the convenience of an online grocery shop and home delivery. Customers can view a range of everyday…

Blair Speedy August 13, 2012 The Australian PATTIES Foods managing director Greg Bourke has a message for food manufacturers complaining about competition from supermarkets’ in-house brands: innovate, cut your costs and stop blaming your customers. The company behind football staple Four’n Twenty meat pies and a host of other food brands, including Nanna’s, Herbert Adams and Creative Gourmet, is a rarity among companies exposed to the discretionary retail sector, this month forecasting annual net profit to rise by as much as 7 per cent. Bourke says he is dismayed when comments accompanying a trading update mentioning competition from supermarket brands are portrayed as another food manufacturer complaining about being squeezed by the two major supermarket chains. “We’re not anti-supermarket, we’re not anti-customers,” he says. Rather than the supermarkets squeezing him for ever lower prices or deleting his products to make room for their own in-house brands, Bourke says the pressure…

Julian Lee Date August 13, 2012 The Age LARGE companies that fail to remove false and misleading comments from their brands’ Facebook pages within 24 hours face potential court action, the competition watchdog has said. Companies are required to monitor comments left by the public to ensure they comply with advertising guidelines and consumer law, after a ruling by the advertising industry’s regulator last week that everything that appears on a brand’s Facebook page is advertising. Now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has lent its voice to the Advertising Standards Board ruling, which has thrown the marketing industry into turmoil as companies face the prospect of being penalised for what members of the public post on their sites. An ACCC commissioner, Sarah Court, said she expected big companies that used Facebook to promote themselves to take down comments within a day or less. ”If you are a big corporate…