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…

Chris Zappone August 10, 2012 The Age We’ve probably all done it: directed the parcel delivery to the office rather than home. Companies, though, are starting to push back, appealing to staff not to jam the office mail room with personal packages. It’s not just the paperless office that’s fallen by the wayside. Firms daily take delivery of an emporium of online purchases that employees find more convenient to direct to their workplaces than their homes. For NAB’s wealth division, that collection included televisions, shoes, wine, cosmetics, books, saucepans, handbags and even children’s toys. All too much for the division’s general manager Paul Carter. “At least 60 per cent of all courier items currently received are not work-related, which equates to around 50 pieces of mail each day,” an exasperated Mr Carter told staff in an email. “This is unacceptable and I ask that all future personal items are directed…

Staff Writers August 10, 2012 news.com.au IT’S no secret Google employees get a sweet deal when it comes to job perks, including gourmet food, on-site doctors and free haircuts. But until now, we didn’t know just how good they have it. Google’s chief people officer Laszlo Bock has revealed a new “death benefits” that means employees are covered not just in life, but in death. The never-before-released details of the tech giant’s perks program include an amazing benefit that if a Googler dies while under the tech giant’s employ, their spouse or life partner will receive 50 per cent of their salary for the next decade. We’ll say that again. The next decade. Death benefits extend to all employees and do not require any tenure or accruement. “One of the things we realized recently was that one of the harshest but most reliable facts of life is that at some…