Magazine: Future embedded in the present

David B. Wood has been the commercial director of Tesco Global Áruházak Zrt. for 3 months. He started his career at Unilever, later worked for Kraft Foods and joined the Tesco team 3 years ago. At Tesco he started as the dairy category director in the United Kingdom. He has always been interested in one of Tesco’s fastest developing branch, the Hungarian one. With this background he was happy to move to Hungary in the summer of 2010, with his wife and two children. – I am still amazed to work above the world’s biggest Tesco store in Budaörs. I look out of the window and see all these cars and the crowds of customers, people who chose Tesco. It is a great honour and responsibility that practically half of Hungary visits one of our stores each month, so we have to meet all kinds of customer demand and expectation – says Mr Wood. Tesco surveys the changing of consumer habits with daily and weekly questionnaires. They know that besides global trends it is very important to be aware of the fact that Hungarian households have to economise and that the popularity of Hungarian products was growing.

This is the reason why Tesco Hungary offers an increasingly wide assortment of products, the best options in price-value ratio and as many Hungarian products as possible. The company is very satisfied with the cooperations established at the Regional Supplier Forums that were organised in Debrecen and Sopron (the next one will be in Pécs): since the autumn of 2009 nearly 40 Hungarian SMEs have appeared in Tesco stores with 132 products – mostly bakery, dairy and meat products. David Wood has great experience in this field because in the United Kingdom Tesco used education, investments and joint planning to help local suppliers – by today these enterprises have multiplied their turnover. Mr Wood told us that they would like to use the same strategy with Hungarian partners: they would like to increase the presently HUF 21 billion export to help Egri Bikavér, delicious salamis and mineral waters appear on the shelves of Tesco stores in neighbouring countries or the UK. Judit Iglódi-Csató, Tesco’s communication director told our magazine that the refurbished Fogarasi Road store was the first Tesco Extra in Hungary – special services and state of the art technology solutions make this store a real success story. With the different store formats (hypermarket, Tesco Express) the company wishes to serve all types of consumer need. There are several green stores all over the country and the company regularly organises selective waste collecting campaigns or blood donations. In a couple of weeks more than 1 million shoppers registered in the ClubCard programme.

Tesco is loyal to their Hungarian customers and to their Hungarian 22,000 employees. The company is dedicated to making Hungarian agriculture and the food industry more competitive. Tesco will continue investing and expanding in Hungary as the driving force behind all of the company’s activities is Hungarian customers.