Nobody ever asks me about Morrisons. Founders ask me about Tesco constantly, Asda all the time, Waitrose more than you'd think, and after enough of these conversations the silence around one particular grocer starts to feel like information in its own right. We never pitched them at LoveRaw either, if I'm honest. Years of buyer meetings, Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, Boots, Co-op, all those rooms with the visitor lanyard that won't clip on properly and the coffee machine you're too nervous to touch, and Morrisons never once made our list. When I try to reconstruct why, there's only fog. Something vague about them being northern, or value led, or somebody else's shopper, none of which I could have defended for even a minute if you'd pushed me on it. Looking back it was a prejudice the whole industry seemed to share, and I never met a single person who'd actually checked it.
This year I checked it. Partly guilt, partly because a founder asked me a Morrisons question over a coffee and I realised, mid-sentence, that I was improvising. So I gave the corporate site a proper evening, expecting the usual supplier portal experience, a dead form and a no-reply address and the faint sense of posting a letter into the sea. What I found instead has been quietly annoying me since, because the grocer everybody skips keeps the most open front door in British food retail, and I could have used that door years ago.
Some background first, since half the point is that most founders have never looked. They're a Bradford company, always have been as far as I know, and depending on when you count they run somewhere just under 500 supermarkets, spread across England and Scotland and Wales, which is a bigger estate than I had in my head before I went looking. Since late 2021 it's been in private equity hands, Clayton, Dubilier and Rice, who paid about £7 billion for it if I remember the number right, and my understanding is that the debt from that deal never really left the business afterwards. You might reasonably wonder why I'm going on about somebody else's balance sheet, and I did ask myself the same thing while writing this. Because the buyer you'll eventually face is squeezed on margin and cash, genuinely squeezed, and every number in your deck lands on a person who gets asked, weekly I'd imagine, where the cash is coming from. Worth holding in your head the whole time you build the thing. Same with the loyalty card, which I nearly skipped past and shouldn't have: something close to four in five of what goes through the tills reportedly goes through the More Card now. So if your promo plan ignores card pricing, bin it and start again, because that's where their shopper actually meets your price.
Then there's the fact that made me put my cup down. Morrisons makes, with its own hands more or less, over half of the fresh food it sells, which I had to read twice before it properly went in. Makes it, I mean, rather than sourcing it from somebody else who makes it. There are bakeries they own, abattoirs they own, fish processing as well, and the whole lot sits inside a manufacturing arm they call Myton Food Group, and as far as I can tell nobody else in British grocery comes anywhere close to running an operation on that scale. It's also why the Market Street counters, the ones with an actual butcher and an actual fishmonger stood behind them, get treated as the soul of the shop. When cost cutting closed counters at around 70 stores in 2025, customers complained loudly enough that reopenings started within the year. Imagine caring that much about a fish counter. Their shoppers apparently do care that much, and once you sit with that fact for a minute it tells you rather a lot about exactly who you would be selling to. It also does something to your cost price. I've sat in rooms at other retailers and watched a buyer wave through a number that, I'm fairly sure, nobody present had properly modelled, and I used to wonder whether anyone ever went back and checked. That particular moment, I'm fairly confident, is not one you will get away with in this building. These people bake their own bread, more or less literally, and they'll have a feel for what your ingredients cost before you've finished the sentence. So go in dead straight on cost, skip the padding you were saving to give away in the second meeting, and let provenance do some of the carrying, where it's made, who makes it, how far it travels to the store. Provenance does real commercial work in this building. It took me an evening on their website to believe that and I do now.
The route in still surprises me with how simple it is, and I went back and checked it twice, because it read like something I must have misunderstood. There's a form on the corporate site called Supplying Morrisons, a register of interest, with a Sourcing team behind it that reads every application. Behind that form sit two programmes, and it's worth working out which one of them you are before you apply, because turning up as the wrong one mostly wastes an afternoon that belongs to both of you. Nation's Local Foodmakers is the one for a product that's already loved near where it's made, and it lets you supply your nearest store direct, or a spread of stores across your region if that suits you better, on simplified agreements with what they describe as preferential payment terms, and on top of that they run regional pitch events where, if the day goes your way, a buyer can put you on shelf there and then. The other one, Growing British Brands, is for a brand already selling well somewhere and ready to scale, a fast track toward a national listing with help getting production and packaging and logistics ready for what a national listing does to a small company. And here's the small thing I've honestly never seen another grocer do, anywhere, in all the years I've been near this trade. They publish the named senior buyer for each category, on the website, publicly, where anyone at all can go and look. I read that page twice to make sure I'd understood it, then went back a third time. The hours we lost at LoveRaw just trying to establish which human being held a category, all that LinkedIn archaeology and begging for second-hand introductions, and Morrisons has simply written the names down.
As for what to ask for, ask for your own region first. I asked for too much too early at other retailers, more than once, and you can feel a room cool when you do it, a sort of polite lowering of the temperature that tells you the meeting has become a favour. A cluster of stores near where you make the product, framed as a trial, proves your rate of sale where your story is strongest, and Local Foodmakers happens to be built exactly that shape. Buyers scale what sells. Hand them something small to say yes to. LoveRaw finished at 13,000 stores across 25 countries and nearly every big listing inside that number started tiny, which I only really appreciated afterwards, tracing back how each one had actually happened.
The deck itself wants provenance and an honest cost price up front, which is nothing like the opening you'd use at Asda. Then real rate of sale from wherever you're stocked now, farm shops included, indies included, don't be shy about them. Then the promo plan that takes the More Card seriously. Then proof you can supply your region today and the wider estate within a year or two, with dates on it. And ask the buyer when the category reviews, because a lovely deck that lands three months after a review closes goes into a drawer however good it is, and nobody rings to tell you that's what happened.
I've written before about why the deck that wins one buyer dies with another, and Morrisons might be the sharpest example I've come across, because this buyer reads carefully for things most decks never mention at all. Building the retailer shaped version of yours is what DeckSmith is for, and the decks built that way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales. The deck is not the magic bullet, there isn't one, but it is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of your brand. Either way, fill in the form this week, while everyone else is still queueing outside Tesco. That door is open. Hardly any of them are.
