\n<\/p>\n
The US cooking oil market is shrinking and unlikely to improve soon because of economic and immigration enforcement pressures on Latino households, the owner of the Mazola brand has said.<\/p>\n
George Weston, the chief executive of Associated British Foods (ABF), told City analysts that cooking oil sales had suffered as \u201cour heavy use consumer is that Hispanic population who are under financial pressure, who are under pressure from Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and are feeling a bit miserable\u201d.<\/p>\n
Anti-immigration raids championed by Donald Trump have disproportionately affected Latino communities, prompting some consumers to switch to online shopping. Weston said Hispanic customers were also reusing cooking oil more frequently.<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically that population will be using oils three times before they throw it out, we think it\u2019s gone to four in many cases,\u201d said the boss of ABF, which also owns brands such as Twinings, Kingsmill and the fashion retailer Primark. \u201cWe don\u2019t think that that\u2019s going to change into 2027.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weston also said Stratas Foods, ABF\u2019s US joint venture supplying oils to the food service sector, was being hit by the rapid uptake of appetite-suppressing drugs. \u201cWe are undoubtedly seeing the consequences of GLP-1s on foodservice demand, particularly for fried food,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
ABF\u2019s overall grocery sales rose 1% in the three months to 20 June, with lower US oils sales offset by growth in brands such as Twinings.<\/p>\n
The group\u2019s total sales rose 3% to \u00a35.3bn in the quarter with sales at Primark up 3%, once the impact of exchange rate changes was removed, offsetting a 4% slump in sales of sugar and a 14% slump in agricultural supplies led by animal feed.<\/p>\n
ABF, which is poised to hive off Primark into a separate listed company, pointed to \u201ca challenging consumer environment across most of our markets\u201d.<\/p>\n
Also under pressure is the UK\u2019s third-largest supermarket, Asda, which revealed this week that it had cut almost 6,000 jobs last year after it sold off the Leon food business and reduced its technology team after largely completing a revamp of its IT systems.<\/p>\n
The job cuts amounted to about 4% of Asda\u2019s workforce, leaving it standing at almost 137,000 by December last year. They included more than 4,600 roles in stores and in Asda\u2019s distribution and grocery buying arm as well as more than 1,000 head office roles.<\/p>\n
Asda said most of the job losses did not involve making people redundant but rather were a result of not replacing staff after they had left or after the sale of the Leon restaurants. Others left the payroll after the ending of IT contracts as it began to wind up \u201cproject future\u201d, the complex shift away from using systems provided by its former majority owner Walmart, the US retailer.<\/p>\n
An Asda spokesperson said: \u201cWe have continued to invest in our colleagues, including pay increases, and maintained higher store hours year on year to support a strong in-store experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asda is battling to turn around its business after a \u00a36.8bn takeover in 2020 by the private equity firm TDR Capital and the Issa brothers, two Blackburn-based billionaires.<\/p>\n
Recently published figures show Asda slumped to a near \u00a31bn loss last year after it kicked off a supermarket price war and spent \u00a3284m more on project future, taking the total spent to about \u00a31.2bn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US cooking oil market is shrinking and unlikely to improve soon because of economic and immigration enforcement pressures on Latino households, the owner of the Mazola brand has said. George Weston, the chief executive of Associated British Foods (ABF), told City analysts that cooking oil sales had suffered as \u201cour heavy use consumer is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[7677,4470,1316,1725,5096,2466,1545,17914,306,24905,268,2070,1791,7659],"class_list":{"0":"post-50843","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-cooking","9":"tag-drink","10":"tag-due","11":"tag-food","12":"tag-households","13":"tag-ice","14":"tag-industry","15":"tag-latino","16":"tag-market","17":"tag-mazola","18":"tag-oil","19":"tag-owner","20":"tag-pressures","21":"tag-shrinking"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}