ABSTRACT
By the early 1990s, ‘food choice’ for the majority of British households was exercised within budget constraints in a food distribution system which, when viewed in international terms, had developed a series of quite distinct characteristics (Cotterill 1997). The nation’s diet, in a very real sense, had been transformed in the 1980s by the emergence of a small group of retail corporations whose turnover, profitability, employment levels and sheer market power came to rival the largest industrial corporations in any sector of the UK economy. Those firms, operating in and actively shaping a regulatory environment supportive of their dominance of the food manufacturer-retailer interface, had assumed the role of ‘channel captains’ in the food system, in the process eliminating the wholesaler sector and shifting UK food distribution to a ‘leading edge’ position in world food system terms on dimensions ranging from inventory control to new food product development. A revolution in physical distribution, logistics and IT systems promoted by these firms had swept through UK food retailing. In turn this had facilitated the development of innovative own-label programmes, a unique chilled ready-meals market, and supply chain management techniques whose global reach incorporated previously exotic foods into the everyday diets of an increasingly wide spectrum of British households. Simultaneously, these firms had become locked into a highly capital-intensive form of competition with important consequences for the infrastructure of supply – the network of food retail outlets in Britain’s towns and cities. British food retailers had been drawn into what, by international standards, were huge investment programmes in fixed assets – the £25m per site out-of-town superstores, ‘the cathedrals of Thatcher’s Britain’ (The Times 19 April 1997: 20). Directly consequent on that had come intense and innovative managerial concern with techniques aimed at controlling operating costs and reducing working capital.
