Coles chief Leah Weckert says supermarket competition is ‘very vigorous’ as she braces for ACCC findings

Coles boss Leah Weckert says the grocery giant is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to manage supply chain headaches as she insists competition in the supermarket sector was “very vigorous”.

Her comments on Friday came as she braces for the release of the competition regulator’s report into the supermarket sector.

Ms Weckert — along with bosses from rivals Woolworths, Metcash and Aldi — fronted the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s supermarket inquiry hearings late last year.

The ACCC’s final report into its year-long inquiry into the supermarket sector was delivered to Treasury at the end of February, although it’s not clear when the Federal Government will release the findings.

While she doesn’t know what’s in the report, Ms Weckert on Friday said she was expecting new rules and recommendations around supplier relationships and pricing transparency.

“I think the other big topics will probably be supplier arrangements. And so I think there’ll be some recommendations, particularly around fresh produce and getting more transparency for producers around price and volume,” she told The Australian’s Global Food Forum in Melbourne.

“I think the other big one will be around pricing and pricing transparency.

“Potentially, we’ll be in a place where there’ll be recommendations to put up signage in-store to indicate when a product has gone through shrinkflation, we may need to have certain minimum font sizes for unit pricing, publishing prices online . . . to make it much easier for the customer to compare prices.”

Ms Weckert pointed to a list of big global players — like Costco and Amazon — who have come in over the past 15 years and substantially changed the market’s competitiveness.

Ms Weckert told the forum that “competition in the grocery sector in Australia is very vigorous”.

“We also are competing with thousands of small retailers as well, so think fresh produce stores, butchers, bakers and what’s really interesting in Australia is a lot of those sit right out the front of our stores,” she said.

“And in the last few years we’ve also seen, in the non-food space, entrants like Bunnings in pet and cleaning (products), you’ve seen Chemist Warehouse and Priceline start to move into areas like toilet paper and laundry and the like.”

Ms Weckert also highlighted Coles’ use of AI, data analytics and process mapping, which details each step in the supply chain.

“It’s really about getting products through faster and this is one of the big things with supply shocks,” she said of the process mapping, pointing to the example of the bird flu outbreaks that have led to an egg shortage.

“One of the big things that we have worked on is, given the reduction and amount of eggs we’ve got in the system, how do we just flow through what we have much faster.

“I think increasingly you’re going to see AI-driven tool become more available, more cost effective to be able to use for a variety of different purposes.”