Ritesh Kulkarni 
Premium ice cream tubs have been a quiet battleground in Australian grocery for years, with private label and imported European brands steadily claiming shelf space that domestic manufacturers once owned. Streets has just decided it wants that space back. The brand, operating under The Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC), has launched Cremissimo — its first … Read more
When a market has only two players and one tries to buy the other, competition regulators tend to notice. New Zealand’s Commerce Commission noticed — and it said no. The commission has blocked the proposed acquisition of Kegstar New Zealand and Konvoy New Zealand, the country’s only two providers of pay-per-fill (PPF) keg services. The … Read more
Currency swings and a product recall are a difficult combination to absorb in a single quarter — and yet Nestlé’s first-quarter numbers tell a story of underlying resilience that most FMCG operators would quietly envy. The headline sales figure looks soft, but the organic picture is considerably more instructive. Total reported sales for the first … Read more
Eighty-two per cent. That’s the market share two supermarket groups hold across New Zealand’s grocery sector, and it’s now the number driving a political push to break up the country’s food retail structure entirely. I’ve watched grocery reform debates come and go across the Tasman, but this one names specific structural remedies — not just … Read more
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent oil, diesel, and fertiliser costs surging — and Australian farmers are absorbing the hit at the worst possible time. Woolworths has moved to cushion some of that pressure, but the structural challenge for the supply chain runs deeper than a single per-litre milk payment. Woolworths has … Read more
Plastic prices hitting four-year highs has achieved something that years of sustainability pledges and consumer pressure could not: it has made alternative packaging commercially attractive almost overnight. For FMCG brands still weighing the cost of switching, the Iran war has effectively made that decision for them. South Korean cosmetic packaging manufacturer Yonwoo, a supplier to … Read more
A $22 billion figure sitting inside existing grocery operations — not in new categories, not in new markets — is the kind of number that stops a room. The ANZ grocery sector has been optimising in silos for years, and a new white paper argues that approach has run its course. The white paper identifies … Read more
Few retail compliance questions generate more confusion per square metre than what a NSW bottle shop can legally do on Anzac Day. The rules are genuinely odd — and the gap between what operators assume and what the law actually requires has cost some retailers real money. With Anzac Day falling on Saturday 25 April … Read more
Moving into the high-strength ready-to-drink segment is a deliberate signal, not a line extension — and for a heritage brand that only recently changed hands, UDL’s timing says something about where Vok Beverages intends to take it. The 8 per cent ABV bracket has been one of the fastest-moving spaces in Australian RTD, and UDL … Read more
Oil at US$100 a barrel is not a hypothetical for Kimberly-Clark — it is a live cost scenario the company is already stress-testing, with up to US$170 million in additional gross input costs potentially landing in the second half of this year. That kind of exposure, sitting outside the current annual forecast, is the sort … Read more
