The Salesforce
Retail Leader
of the Year
Simon Roberts
How Simon Roberts mixed tradition with innovation in putting food first at Sainsbury’s
As Sainsbury’s chief executive Simon Roberts wins the Salesforce Retail Leader of the Year 2024, we meet the man who arrested the supermarket giant’s slumping market share and guided it through Covid and the cost-of-living crisis by putting food back at the heart of the business
Now entering his fourth year at the helm of the country’s second-largest supermarket, both Simon Roberts and Sainsbury’s are on a roll.
In December 2023, Sainsbury’s reported its biggest jump in grocery market share in over a decade, before delivering a bumper Christmas trading period, driven by a 9.3% jump in grocery sales.
It represented a vindication of Roberts’ ‘Food First’ strategy, which he unveiled in November 2020. At the time, Sainsbury’s market share was hovering at 14.9% with Asda breathing down its neck on 14.5%. In the most recent Kantar data for February 2024, Sainsbury’s market share stood at 15.6% while Asda’s had slipped to 13.8%.
In short, the strategy reprioritised the food business above the other Sainsbury’s brands such as Argos, Tu Clothing and Habitat in terms of investment. It also meant those brands, huge businesses in their own right, played a supporting role to the core food offer.
While time has borne out the strategy, it was a brave decision by Roberts, who had been chief executive for less than a year. It was also made at a time when Sainsbury’s was grappling with the seismic changes caused by the pandemic.
Despite all that, Roberts says he was convinced the decision to put the food business first was right.
“We were too spread out as a business. We’d been losing market share for quite a long time. We hadn’t been able to be as competitive as we used to be and we were, frankly, too expensive and losing customers,” he says.
“But as we came through that [first] year, there was a compelling energy across the business asking: ‘How can we turn this around and really get the food business moving?' Sainsbury’s has such a strong heritage in food and everyone wanted to go back to the fundamentals of what makes Sainsbury’s the business it is.”
Under the strategy, Sainsbury’s has firmly re-established itself as UK grocery’s number two and has begun winning share from the discounters for the first time, all by being relentless in its focus on offering customers good food at competitive prices.
“Leadership fundamentally is about being in the service of others. Those principles I learned, from my first store as a manager to being the CEO of Sainsbury’s, are the same”
The next level
While Roberts may have looked to Sainsbury’s past with Food First, his time in charge has been marked by innovation, not least launching personalised Nectar Prices for customers for the first time in April 2023.
Building on the success of Food First, Roberts and his team unveiled the strategy’s latest iteration, ‘Next Level’, in February. The evolution will be focused on getting Sainsbury’s full food range into more supermarkets while leveraging the other brands such as Argos and Nectar to drive bigger customer baskets.
“Food First was a success. We’ve seen customers coming back to Sainsbury’s for their main shop, and Next Level is about continuing that,” Roberts says. “The next job is not just about sustaining the competitive position we’ve created but also improving our range and assortment in many more of our stores.”
Despite his success, Roberts looks somewhat uncomfortable about the accolade being bestowed on him by his retail peers. “What matters most to me is always the people that I work with,” he maintains. “At the end of the day, any success a leader enjoys is just the culmination of everyone else’s hard work.”
“All three businesses I've worked for have very strong traditions but they also each have an incredibly strong purpose and that really matters to me”
A life in retail
Roberts’ route to the top of Sainsbury’s is a classic shop floor-to-boardroom tale. Like many retail leaders, his first taste of the industry was working part-time in a store while he was at school, but even at that early stage he still had a familial connection to the business he would one day end up running.
“My mum had an evening job at Sainsbury’s when I was young,” he says. “She used to go out and fill up shelves. So, Sainsbury’s was something that I had always been close to.”
It was at a Marks & Spencer store in his native Croydon, south London, where a young Roberts got his retail start. He was studying maths, further maths, physics and technology for his A Levels at the time.
“I got a Saturday job at M&S when I was 16. It was just a way of paying for my car,” Roberts laughs. However, plans to go to university and become an electrical engineer soon took a backseat to retail because “it was a real contrast to what I was doing outside of that and I absolutely loved it”.
At 18, Roberts joined M&S’ vaunted manager training programme, which has produced so many of UK retail’s leaders, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“It just seemed like such a great opportunity,” Roberts says. “I thought, if it didn’t work out, I could always go back to university. But I’ve never looked back. And that was over 30 years ago.”
Roberts says Sainsbury’s purpose is ‘to make good food joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone every day‘
Roberts says Sainsbury’s purpose is ‘to make good food joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone every day‘
Roberts says his first job as a store manager informed the sort of leader he would become. “There I was, 18 years old, managing a team of 10 to 15 people, most of them much older and more experienced than I was.
“It taught me that leadership fundamentally is about being in the service of others. Those principles I learned with that group of people, from my first store as a manager to being the CEO of Sainsbury’s, are the same.”
After a decade at M&S, Roberts moved to Boots. It was there that his career took the next step when, in 2008, he was promoted to retail director. “At the time I was like, oh my goodness, how am I going to do that job?
“We had a couple of thousand stores at Boots and at that time the business was going through an enormous amount of change. I learned so much in that period, what with Boots first being taken private and the Walgreens sale that happened after that.”
During his 11-year spell at Boots, Roberts would go on to work alongside Ken Murphy, now the chief executive of Tesco, as joint operating officer before eventually going on to run its UK and Ireland business. He was promoted to president after the Walgreens merger.
Roberts joined Sainsbury’s in 2017 as retail and operations director under his predecessor Mike Coupe, where he was responsible for stores, central operations and logistics, before taking the top job at the beginning of 2020.
Reflecting on his career to this point, Roberts says working for three such historic British brands has instilled in him the importance of having a purpose beyond just growing sales and profits.
“I’ve been fortunate to be part of three retail businesses that were all born in the UK in the 1800s. M&S, founded in 1884, its purpose was don’t ask the price, it all costs a penny. Boots in 1849, when the rich died rich and the poor died young because they couldn’t afford access to healthcare. Sainsbury’s in 1869, set up by John James and Mary Ann because they couldn’t buy eggs, milk, butter and ham in a shop that was safe to eat.
“All three businesses have very strong traditions but they also each have an incredibly strong purpose and that really matters to me.”
“My job is to make sure that Sainsbury’s is a strong and more sustainable business, not just for next year but for the next 150 years”
Customers and colleagues
That sense of purpose was behind the shift to Food First and by extension the move now to Next Level, but it has also reinforced to Roberts the commitment Sainsbury’s has to its customers and staff.
Through the pandemic, Roberts and his team were at the forefront of feeding the nation and keeping its shelves stocked as people stayed at home. More recently, as the pandemic has retreated, Roberts has been grappling with another seismic problem: the cost-of-living crisis.
By launching schemes such as the Aldi Price Match and Nectar Prices offers, Roberts says he and his staff have done everything possible to support customers through difficult times.
“At the worst of the cost-of-living crisis, everyone was talking about inflation being in the high teens on food. At Sainsbury’s, it was never more than half of that figure. That’s because we put all our efforts into doing the best possible job to support customers with lower prices and to help them make their budgets go further.”
To have the financial ammunition to invest in price, Roberts and his team made tough decisions early in its Food First journey, such as shutting its service counters, as part of the Save to Invest programme. The retailer saved £1.3bn in the first three years across the business to invest back into its food offer.
Over the next three years of the Next Level strategy, Sainsbury’s has earmarked £1bn of savings to reinvest by 2027. “It comes back to having that clear purpose,” Roberts insists. “To make good food joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone every day.
“That purpose leads you to take decisions you need to take to support and enable the business to grow stronger every day.”
Nectar Prices is one of the schemes Sainsbury's introduced to support customers
Nectar Prices is one of the schemes Sainsbury's introduced to support customers
While customers are always at the forefront of Roberts’ mind, his tenure at Sainsbury’s has also brought improved staff pay. He is hugely proud that frontline Sainsbury’s employees have received a 50% wage increase since 2018, but there are other ways he has fostered supporting staff.
“As a leader, nothing beats, in my view, being in the space that our colleagues are in every day and spending time with those people. Recently, we had a call with thousands of staff, talking about the real issues that are on their minds.
“I also attend a lot of listening groups and drop-in sessions with colleagues all the time. It’s hugely important to me that I’m close to what’s on my colleagues’ minds.”
From these sessions have come schemes such as offering Sainsbury’s staff free food, as well as the retailer’s increased focus on employee safety. The grocer was one of the first retailers to invest in body-worn cameras for staff to combat the rise in abuse and crime.
“We don’t always get everything right,” Roberts says. “But with everything we do, we always try to go back to that philosophy of being in service to others.”
After four challenging years, Roberts is looking ahead to the next iteration of Sainsbury’s under his leadership. “Fundamentally, my job is to make sure that Sainsbury’s is a strong and more sustainable business, not just for next year but for the next 150 years.”
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