Message from CEO

Dear Customer,

With the current pandemic we are all experiencing at a global level and the panic buying situation it caused, online sales will be suspended until we have cleared the backlog.

We hope to be in a position to recommence online sales and delivery by next week.

An increasing number of you have told me that you're not always able to get the items that you need when you need them. We are working with our suppliers to get even more stock of essential items and we are adding warehouse capacity on a daily basis.

This means we can focus our store colleagues' time on keeping shelves stocked and serving our customers well during the times that most of you are already shopping.

Hundreds of you have written to me to thank our amazing colleagues who are working around the clock to serve our customers. A number of you have also shared your concerns for the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues. I want you to know that we are doing all we can to support everyone who works in our business. We have committed to paying all colleagues who are unwell or need to self-isolate for the full period of fourteen days. We have also committed to paying vulnerable and elderly colleagues in full if the government decides they should isolate for 12 weeks. We hope this will go some way to helping our teams through this uncertain time and we are looking at other ways to thank our colleagues for their extraordinary efforts.

To keep our colleagues safe, I need to ask again for your help. Please do your best to stand one metre away from colleagues in our stores where you can. And we would prefer you to pay with card rather than cash at our tills. Please also treat our colleagues and other customers with kindness and respect. These are unprecedented circumstances and our colleagues are being asked to come to work every day while so many others are being asked to stay at home. We all need them to keep coming to work to feed the nation – a small thank you goes a really long way.

A few customers have been upset by the price increases we have had to introduce. The reason our prices have slightly increased is because the price of our high quality produce has increased from our main suppliers. We refuse to sell anything other than 100% Halal, and whilst that sounds obvious, we will have to do whatever it takes to keep our standards high. With stricter movement of people and goods, there has been a knock on effect across the supply chain hence price increases. The alternative would be to stop selling meat which none of our customers want.

We are confident what we are experiencing is temporary and normality will resume soon. Till then I hope you will join is in looking after each other and the communities we serve.

Kind regards,
Tariq Latif Sheikh
Chairman