Our people, talent and culture are our co-op’s most valuable assets.

The first crisis-free year since 2019 allowed us to ramp up our already unwavering focus on attracting the best people, developing and celebrating their talent, and fostering a positive co-op culture.

For our People & Capability teams, it was a privilege to partner across the business and with Members to support our focus on awesome people experiences.

Recruitment

As at 31 March 2024, Foodstuffs North Island and our stores collectively provided employment to over 25,000 full and part-time team members: just over 22,000 in our stores, 1,413 in our supply chain, and 1,475 in our support centre.

This year our co-op collectively welcomed 13,671 new Foodies on board, including 743 across our support centre and supply chain.

Our ownership pipeline delivered 12 Owner Operators to their first New World store, 13 newly-approved Four Square Owners, and 11 people on our Trainee Operator Programme.

New team members in stores are benefitting from our ‘First 90 Days’ online induction modules, with 199 stores accessing them. In total, more than 1,100 induction-related modules have been accessed by new and existing team members seeking compliance learning.

Safety and wellbeing

The safety of our team members is of the utmost importance to our co-op, simply because everyone deserves to arrive at work feeling safe, and to return home unharmed.

This is a key reason why 25 of our stores agreed to trial facial recognition technology in their stores from February 2024, to see if this technology can help better identify repeat offenders and reduce crime, by keeping repeat offenders from coming back into a store after they’ve been trespassed.

In FY24, we recorded a Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) of 1.3 across FSNI, which is less than half the 2.9 that we recorded in FY23. LTIFR measures the number of injuries resulting in time off work of at least one day/shift, per million hours worked. This was due to our ongoing focus on preventing serious incidents.

At the same time, our Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate – the number of injuries needing medical treatment per million hours worked within an organisation – rose from 14.1 in FY23 to 22.5 in FY24. This data includes our contractor injury rates and is an area of focus for us this coming year.

Our supply chain team saw a record-low number of injuries, despite a 10% increase in cartons handled, with just six team members needing time off to recover (a 33% reduction, year-on-year). In total, they investigated 32 critical safety events, which are potentially high-risk incidents we’ve since taken steps to prevent.

Team members’ willingness to report safety risks, and record-low numbers of speeding or distraction events in our trucks, show a growing safety culture and we’ll focus on this in the year ahead.

Other ways we looked out for our team members’ physical safety in FY24:

• Store Safety Management System Assessments across all brands, reviewing 300+ stores’ health and safety systems for harm prevention as well as looking at their strengths and opportunities.
• Critical risk reset reviewed what poses the greatest possibility of serious harm to team members and refocused our safety efforts.
• Launched our Thrive wellbeing platform, promoting initiatives like FSNI’s four-week ‘Pallet to Plate’ challenge, which saw 864 participants walk over 200,000km combined in early 2024.
• Safety & Wellbeing Roadshow events for Owner Operators and Compliance Managers, focusing on critical risks and critical controls, with almost 200 attendees across the North Island.
• Completed ACC’s Accredited Employers Programme (AEP) annual audit, retaining our ‘tertiary’ rating, which confirms our good safety framework and continuous improvement.

Mental health and wellbeing remained a priority too, including:

• Rollout of our Mental Health and Wellbeing Framework, which sets out our support structure and programme to care for our team members.
• Mental health first aid training for over 60 Foodies, to help them identify and respond to a mental health crisis in the workplace.
• Establishing our Wellbeing Response Team, who support Mental Health First Aiders and can be deployed when required after serious incidents and crises (and were used twice this year).

Fostering great talent

We’re proud of our longstanding record of supporting talent by helping team members advance their careers, and in FY24 there was strong demand for formal learning and development opportunities.

In FY24, we saw a strong increase of our people engaged in one or more Foodies training programmes, which is an investment in our business and our people, providing lifelong professional abilities.

We remain New Zealand’s leading provider of food preparation apprenticeships, with 121 of our New World, PAK’nSAVE and Four Square stores offering bakery and butchery apprenticeships in FY24.

As at 31 March 2024, 295 team members were enrolled in our apprenticeship programmes (125 in bakery and 170 in butchery), including 127 new enrolments. Another 60 team members have since completed their qualification during the year (24 in bakery and 36 in butchery).

Such opportunities and events underscore our commitment to investing in the people who are part of our communities, in every region of the North Island.

Team leaders across our co-op continued to attend external learning and networking opportunities, helping us and them gain insights and build relationships through events such as the Women in Retail and FMCG Leadership Summit.

Internal learning opportunities included our Retailing Excellence programme for department managers, Store Mastery programme and Operational Excellence modules for store managers, and our own Women in Retail internal programme. We also launched a series in Leadership Development for our senior support centre leaders and a Managing Wellness programme.

Encouraging and celebrating talent was a priority too, through in-house events like our annual Baker of the Year and Checker of the Year competitions. These and all our learning programmes are celebrated at our annual Graduation and Excellence Awards.

We also supported Foodies to take part in external events such as Retail Meat NZ’s National Butchery Awards, and the annual Great New Zealand Sausage Competition.

CASE STUDY: RISING BUTCHERY STAR

New World Regent butcher Anton Rameka made the grand finals of the ANZCO Butchery Apprentice of the Year competition in 2023 – for the second year in a row.  The competition pitted Rameka against five other contestants, including two colleagues, Renee Steer from New World Marton and Monika Remes from PAK’nSAVE Papamoa.  After two hours of cutting, boning, and presenting, Rameka was named the competition’s runner up, in second place behind New World Motueka butcher Morgan Moore.  Rameka’s dream is to be selected for the national competitive butchery team, the Heller’s Sharp Blacks.   “Watching them compete inspired me to take up a butchery apprenticeship and start taking part in my own events,” he says.

Equality, diversity and inclusion

We’re committed to being a co-op that authentically reflects and serves Aotearoa's communities.

We welcome courageous behaviour, encourage togetherness, inspire our people to be uniquely themselves, but most importantly we celebrate our people – our taonga.

Our diversity, inclusion and equity strategy is a strong pillar of our success as a co-op and helps ensure everyone can come to work and thrive.

In FY24, we received our first Gender Tick, which is an independent annual accreditation that acknowledges organisations that demonstrate their compliance and leadership in gender equality.

For FSNI, we stayed focused on paying our people fairly, including initiatives to ensure our gender pay gap is lower than the national average across the North Island, at -0.2% compared to 8.6%.

FY24 saw us welcome the team from TupuToa to our Support Centre at Landing Drive. TupuToa aims to increase leadership representation of Māori and Pacific people through internships at leading organisations. Alongside our partnership, TupuToa now calls Landing Drive home.

Our employee tribes continued to thrive, creating a vibrant ecosystem of diversity and inclusion. Tribes include Moana, Pasifika, Chiwi, Rainbow, FING, Accessibility and the Women’s Tribe. Around 50 members from those tribes regularly meet to drive initiatives to foster a more inclusive co-op.