There are to be “no significant changes” to Tesco’s in-store bakeries this year, the retailer has said.
The statement follows newspaper reports that claimed Tesco would be switching from using fresh dough in its in-store bakeries to frozen dough – a move that one industry expert said could have an impact on the number of staff and amount of equipment required.
However, Tesco has now clarified that changes are not on the cards at this time. “Contrary to media reports over the weekend, we do not plan to make any significant changes to bakeries this year,” it said in a statement.
“Media speculation over the weekend was premature and we have accelerated our communications to colleagues in order to reduce the significant uncertainty created by incorrect information.”
However, the retailer did confirm that its fresh foods operation would be impacted as part of a major overhaul, which will see nearly 9,000 jobs affected.
“Overall, we estimate that up to 9,000 Tesco colleague roles could be impacted. However, our expectation is that up to half of these colleagues could be redeployed to other customer-facing roles,” Tesco added.
This shake-up will include changes to the fresh foods counters in its larger stores, as well as changing the way stock is managed to produce a “significantly reduced workload”.
“Not only are customers shopping in different ways, but we know that they have less time available to shop too – which means they are using our counters less frequently. We will be making changes to the counters in our large stores to ensure we have the right offer for customers. We expect that around 90 stores will close their counters, with the remaining 700 trading with either a full or flexible counter offer for our customers,” Tesco said.
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