The Wholesale Group concluded its first conference on a celebratory note, reflecting on the progress made since its formation at the beginning of 2025.
With the theme ‘Innovate, Share, Thrive’, wholesale members and suppliers attended the conference, which took place in Tenerife, and took part in more than 645 business development meetings to cement plans for collaborative working for 2026.
The Wholesale Group is now established as the UK’s largest delivered buying group, the UK’s largest foodservice buying group and the UK’s second largest retail buying group, representing 14% of the UK wholesale industry.
Chairman Mark Aylwin and Joint Managing Directors Tom Gittins, Jess Douglas and Coral Rose told Wholesale Manager about the group’s new Jake AI and their target to grow turnover to £5 billion by 2027.
What were the big headlines from the conference?
Jess Douglas: It was the biggest conference yet, with the largest amount of attendees. And I would say that the main takeaway was that being a new group, it didn’t feel like a new group. The atmosphere was what really made it a success.
Mark Aylwin: That was my key takeaway, you wouldn’t have thought that it was the group’s first conference. You’ve got members and colleagues from two different companies who have only been together for a year and when I came into the conference, it felt like everybody had known each other for a long time, and there weren’t cliques. I’ve been involved in many mergers and one that always makes me laugh was Safeway Presto, which was 40 years ago. You talk to somebody from Safeway or Presto now they will say, were you Safeway or were you Presto? Typically, companies don’t really merge, but this one felt like it had really come together.
What is unique about the new Jake AI?
Tom Gittins: I think that it’s totally focused on our business. It’s not a generative AI that just has all the information put into it from all over the world. We know about the problems with that, that it can hallucinate, that it can come up with some quite interesting answers. We’ve built it, we’ve put the guardrails on him, he is specifically for us. He’s only loaded with data and information from our company. That makes the insight better.
That makes the quality of the responses better because the quality of the data is better. We’ve got sales in there, we’ve got sales out there. We’ve got all the information about our suppliers, all our members, all the trading, history, pricing, promotions and images. It’s also about access to that network. Before you’d have to log in, or you might have to search, it’s just so quick. And I think that speed that Jake is going to bring to the way we do business is really going to accelerate our growth.
Coral Rose: He can also do a bespoke business plan by a member and supplier at that level. We could say, what are the opportunities for Bramley’s to increase their sales and it will look at other similar businesses and look at what suppliers are not dealing with, or categories that they could be selling. So that’s great for Bramley’s. Or for a supplier, we could say, where are my missing opportunities? And then it will look at the categories. So not only does it access the data, it tells you how to use it and how to grow, because Jake has been grown just with wholesale data. He’s not thinking about US markets or other markets. He’s been designed to look at the history of what’s happened and what the potential could be. And the more that he goes on, the more he learns. So he’s getting better all the time.
Jess Douglas: And that’s our main strategy with the group, to get our members and suppliers doing more throughout the group. We don’t necessarily need more members, it’s increasing the loyalty and increasing the opportunities that are there. We’ve got opportunities in every pocket around the country.
Tom Gittins: We are diverse, and we use that diversity to grow. An AI can sift the data so much quicker than anything else, give you that insight and tell you where the opportunities are, tell you where the gaps are. Jake is just about our group and our ecosystem, I think that’s the key. This isn’t some off the shelf product. This is our ecosystem and has taken us nine months to develop. It’s business insight.
Jess Douglas: And this isn’t using Chat GTP to make your life a bit easier in the office. It’s way more than that.
Mark Aylwin: To me, that’s the biggest benefit. People are trained to go on a course, use chat GPT, use this. And loads of companies have got data, but very few companies can get information, and this is the quickest way to turn data into information. If you recruit somebody tomorrow, and they use chat GPT, they’ll be able to use Jake AI. It doesn’t take months of training. Joint business plans are so important, but they take ages to do. With Jake, you could do a business plan on the way to a meeting and get an email.
Tom Gittins: I was using Jake in the conference, it was brilliant. I was sitting having a drink on a rooftop bar in beautiful Tenerife. I had Vimto here and Britvic here, and they were arguing over who sold the most squash. So I asked Jake, and he came back, and it turned out they were the numbers three and five sellers within our group. So two brands actually sold more within the group. So immediately, there was an opportunity to say we are under-trading. We had better do a bit more. So there is power for a buying group to be able to work with the suppliers and members and really develop the business and then drill into, how are we going to grow that? Which members can buy this type of squash, which are already buying it, which can, which are dealing with schools that need squash. It just goes on and on, and the information is there like that. It’s incredibly powerful,
Jess Douglas: It’s not taking away from the human, because you still need to put the humans to come up with that plan together. I did an English degree and I always think of it as like looking at a blank page, where do you start? Jake takes away that problem. It’s not the answer to everything. It’s just how to help everyone.
Tom Gittins: He’s Jake as an AI assistant. We’ve got this huge pool of data. Tesco have been using the loyalty programmes for 40 years. I don’t think wholesale is using that at the moment, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve.
You said you are not necessarily looking to grow the number of members. Is it more about growing the overall turnover?
Jess Douglas: We want to grow our members’ business. The whole ethos and point of the buying group is to help our membership grow their business. It’s not about just getting more members to make our turnover bigger. If their businesses grow, that grows us. It’s not a numbers game.
Coral Rose: It’s not saying that we’re not going to have any more members. It’s not that we’re closed. But if somebody wants to come and join us, then we want to make sure that we can add value to them, and they can add value to us.
Your target is to grow turnover to £5 billion by 2027, and it’s currently at £4.42 billion? How much have you grown turnover in recent years?
Jess Douglas: We were at £1.2 billion in 2019.
Tom Gittins: We’ve got the same amount of members now as we had then. The members’ businesses are growing and we are helping them grow. Delivered wholesale is growing.
Coral Rose: We’ve had the merger as well, so we are combined as a group, we have the propensity to get the combination of people. We have got more suppliers now. There were the respective groups doing their own growth. Together, now we’ve got more. We’ve added 105 suppliers. Within the previous Confex membership, you’ve got all those suppliers, now you can sell to them. There are additional ones from Fairway Foodservice. So collectively now it is The Wholesale Group. We’ve got a good range of members engaged and significantly more suppliers. So rather than go out and get more members in, we’re thinking, what’s the opportunity? Because the more that members buy through the group, the more beneficial it is for suppliers, and the more it is for members as well. So that’s the focus.
Tom Gittins: Our goals are to grow the own brand, grow the branded sales and develop new categories. Protein, I think, is going to be up there. What’s the next big energy drink? We want to help our members understand those new categories and grow organically.
So you are well on target to hit the £5 billion turnover?
Coral Rose: It’s not an unrealistic target. We can analyse, we can say, this is the typical wholesaler of this size. If we plug in all the gaps, if all the members bought all their brands through the group, then we identify where are the categories with gaps. There are lots of suppliers approaching us, but if there’s no headspace in that category for them, we can’t really add value. We look at where there are categories with room for growth, or we need suppliers to come in, whether a branded one, or whether it’s an own brand opportunity, because the category requires brand and own brand. Not everyone is going to buy just the own brand. It’s looking at what brands are required to do that category and make sure that we’ve got that complete offer to suit the diverse range of members we have. There are lots of different levers, which is why we need the AI to help us plug all those things together to come up with a solution. But there’s plenty of opportunity within the group.
Tom Gittins: And back to the squash scenario. I’m speaking to Vimto and to Robinsons/Britvic. They are the two biggest squash players in the market. So why aren’t they the biggest with us? So that’s the opportunity. We’re teaching suppliers and helping them to get the right ranges for us and the right promotions.
What are your plans for the CHEF Approved own brand range?
Coral Rose: We have about 350 products in the CHEF Approved range. They range from everything from basic ingredients to some high quality, across all temperature categories. We then have the CHEF Prestige range, which is the superior quality product. For example, the CHEF Prestige mayonnaise has got free range egg versus a general egg. We also have CLEAN Solutions. It’s a whole range of chemicals and cleaning products. The main thing is that the members buy into the own brand through the buzz that we’ve invested, the resource and the marketing and technical knowledge to support that.
Tom Gittins: We’re going to continue extending the own brand range.
Jess Douglas: There’s a lot of potential. We are just at the start, because it’s a new brand. So there’s a lot of focus on getting the confidence and the credibility. We have got all the history behind it. It’s about getting customers who were buying a previous brand. It’s now going to be called CHEF Approved once they switch in. It’s going to be very busy with continuous product development.
Coral Rose: Our other big news is that Mark’s come on board.
Tom Gittins: Mark approached us, and we’re very proud and lucky that he wanted to. He could see the potential about what’s happened here and where we are going. So hopefully he will guide us with that.
What attracted you to the group, Mark?
Mark Aylwin: I obviously knew Confex and Fairway in the past and independently. They were quite niche but when you bring the two together, you can see that there is scale on both. I think the way the merger was brought together, the way they retained the leadership team, all of those things ticked my boxes in terms of how successful mergers should be done. I mean, 75% of mergers fail. So this one is a great start, and I think we’ve got a great team. It was great to go to the conference and see the strength of the members and the strength of the support for the supply base.
The other thing that I’m attracted to is in the last 12 months, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time trying to push the data agenda for wholesale, because we are so far behind. And with the way we have seen Tesco accelerate over the last two years, we know that others will follow. They were always there, but they’re at another level now. If we don’t do that in wholesale, we will be left behind, because when the suppliers go to their board and they’re looking for investment, the Tesco supplier, the Tesco account manager has a whole load of data to say, this is why we should buy from Tesco. We in wholesale need to get to the same place. I think Jake AI helps both the supplier and the member pull that information together into a format that becomes a compelling proposition for wholesale. It’s very important that we all do this. In summary by merging the two, we’ve created something really exciting, but it’s so nimble, because it’s still a small business, management wise. We can move much faster and adopt new technologies like that.
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