Tesco shakes up wine buying team

Published: 15 June, 2012

Tesco has made changes to its wine buying team following the departure of category buying manager Claire Lorains.

The supermarket has promoted Liam Wylie to the position of buyer and Christel McCombie to assistant buyer.

Both Wylie and McCombie will work within Tesco's branded wine stream and report to buying manager Sarah Davies.

Before starting at Tesco in July last year, Wylie worked for two years at Kellogg's as national account executive on the Tesco account.

McCombie joined the Tesco wine team as part of the graduate scheme in September 2011, following four years at Strathclyde University where she completed a marketing degree.

Former category buying manager Lorains has been promoted to category director for healthcare and the retailer is searching for a suitable replacement.

Tesco is one of the world's largest retailers with operations in 14 countries, employing over 500,000 people.

Its UK business employs over 300,000 people and has over 2,900 stores. Over 60% of group sales and profits come from the UK business.

In April 2012, on the back of falling sales, chief executive Philip Clark announced a £1 billion commitment in this financial year to improve the shopping trip for customers.

This move will also add more staff to the wine aisle in order to better help customers with their wine choice.

Tesco revealed that like-for-like sales, excluding both VAT and petrol, dropped, 1.5% during its first quarter to May 26, a slight improvement on the 1.6% fall in the previous quarter, which was marginally better than most analysts predicted. During the Diamond Jubilee, the supermarket sold 750,000 cases of Champagne.

Tesco's Finest and Everyday Value are the two largest food brands in the UK - bigger than Coca-Cola - each with more than £1 billion of sales per year.

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