Covirán is eyeing potential acquisitions in Portugal

Lisbon: Spanish supermarket chain Covirán is eyeing potential acquisitions as French retailer Auchan is forced to sell off some of its Portuguese stores, according to Spanish daily Expansión.

This divestiture is a condition imposed by the Portuguese Competition Authority (Autoridade da Concorrência – AdC) to approve Auchan’s purchase of the Minipreço chain.

HelloFresh SE (“HelloFresh” or “Company”) released its financial results for the second quarter of 2024. The HelloFresh Group delivered a quarterly revenue of approx. €1.95bln, corresponding to an approx. 0.9% constant currency growth (Q2 2023: €1.92bln). The HelloFresh Group achieved an AEBITDA of €146mln (Q2 2023: €192mln), a margin of 7.5% (Q2 2023: 10.0%) for the Group, including a margin of 4.0% (Q2 2023: 8.5%) for the RTE product category and of 12.2% (Q2 2023: 12.9%) for the meal kit product category.

Higher wages and keener pricing are cutting into the margins of Poland’s biggest supermarket chain, Biedronka. Biedronka’s earnings per share before tax (EBITDA) margin for the first half of 2024 fell from 8.5% to 7.6% compared to last year, according to the Portuguese-owned retailer. “Our lower margins are the effect of raising wages for our shop and warehouse staff”, Luis Araújo, the CEO of Biedronka’s owner, Jeronimo Martins, said in an interview with the Polish business daily Puls Biznesu.

New research from the University of Auckland has found the cost of feeding a family of four has increased 35% in the last six years, rising by 13.6% in 2023 alone. And the price of lower-cost healthy foods was increasing faster than other foods at the supermarket. Lead researcher Dr Joanna Strom told Newsable the study focused on food such as carrots, frozen peas, apples, bananas, eggs and cheese.

Tesco has gained market share in the UK every month since August 2023, with the retailer now holding 27.6% of the British grocery market, new data from Kantar has found.

Over the past year, ALDI customers across Ireland have saved a total of 207,000 Surprise Bags from going to waste, through the retailer’s partnership with Too Good To Go. This means that customers at ALDI’s 161 stores across Ireland have saved more than €1.6mln in that time.

Amazon has partnered with TikTok and Pinterest to allow users to buy products directly through the social media apps. At the moment, this trial is limited to users in the United States.