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Retail Intelligence

Weekly Round-up... 28 April 2021

By Donna Ahern
Weekly Round-up... 28 April 2021

Partnering with a number of growers from Meath, Dublin and Wexford, BWG Foods is the first retailer to market with Irish strawberries, four weeks earlier than last year. The business anticipates sales of the iconic home grown fruit to reach record breaking heights this summer due to a particularly strong harvest resulting in higher quality produce with a fresher, more flavoursome taste. Local growers point to weather conditions and scaled up farming as having led to one of the best strawberry yields in some time. According to BWG Foods, owners and operators of the Spar, Eurospar, Londis, Mace, and XL retail brands with a network of more than 1,000 stores across Ireland, a greater preference for fresh fruit and vegetables among Irish shoppers so far this year will also create greater demand for other seasonal fruit produce such as raspberries and blackberries which are set to outperform 2020 sales this summer.

UK retailer Asda has introduced new packaging across its entire chicken range, which it says will remove 450 tonnes of plastic from its operations annually. The initiative will see the retailer move its chicken assortment out of plastic trays and into the new pouches and reduce plastic packaging by up to 50% across the range. The rollout follows a successful trial last year on mini-fillets and diced breasts, reprts esmmagazine.com. The initiative aligns with Asda’s ongoing commitment to ‘use less and recycle more’, the retailer added.

Domino's Pizza Inc and Nuro Inc, a Silicon Valley startup, said on they will launch robotic pizza delivery in Houston this week, seeking to capitalise on rising online orders caused by the pandemic, reports Reuters. Nuro, founded by two former Google engineers in 2016, raised $940 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund and recently secured an undisclosed amount of equity investment from Woven Capital, the mobility investment arm of a Toyota Motor Corp subsidiary. With a small, low-speed vehicle to carry packages instead of people, the robot company has been pulling ahead of other autonomous startups in gaining regulatory approvals for on-road vehicle deployment.

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