Coop Farms Deemed Non Core - A Strange Conclusion in a Food Business

How disappointing to hear that the Coop has decided to sell its 15 farms after owning them since 1896. As their web site says –“nothing makes better sense than for the Co-operative to produce our own food for our own stores.” And there will have been many consumers who believed this and saw it as a reason to shop at the Coop.

Yet, dig a bit deeper and it is clear that the farms business, like every other aspect of the Coop has been run in an ad hoc, un-strategic and ultimately disastrous fashion.

It turns out that of the 49,000 acres under Coop management, just one third is owned, and the remainder is on let land or contract farming arrangements.

And, far from fulfilling the promise on the Coop website to use Coop produce in Coop stores, it turns out, according to Chief Executive Euan Sutherland, that only 2-3% of production goes to its own stores, mainly potatoes. Some 70% of production is in cereals, mostly sold to other companies.

Despite ownership of such vast quantities of land, the Coop farms none of its own livestock. It was in dairying but came out in 2003 to concentrate on arable products.

The trends towards buying local, worrying about provenance and buying British has been evident since the early 2000’s. The Coop was clearly aware of this, hence the blurb on the website, yet lacked the will or the sense to utilise their precious farming asset to take advantage of the trends. Indeed, the Coop could be accused of blatantly misleading consumers.

Anyway, the farms will go. Apparently they will raise about £140m which will help to pay down debt.

So what of the Coop food business now? It has been losing market share for years. The new head of food, ex Tesco executive Steve Murrells said in an interview last week “Our stores were, frankly, awful”. His answer is to streamline the range of goods offered, open more smaller stores to take advantage of the growth in convenience shopping, and test out selling online.

That will not in itself be enough to save the business. Tesco and Sainsbury have been investing in convenience and online for years, and Morrisons is running hard to catch up. The Coop has no obvious point of difference in their offer to attract consumers from the big players.

Yet in the farms it could have had a powerful differentiator. In today’s climate of increasing worry about where food comes from, animal welfare and ethical production considerations, what could be more compelling than knowing that the place you shop at has managed the production of the food it sells all the way from farm to shop shelf.

But of course it is too late now. It looks like the Coop is throwing away what could have been a competitive point of difference in an increasingly cut throat grocery world.