Booker Group is the UK’s leading food wholesaler.

Booker Wholesale and Makro are the UK's largest cash and carry operators, offering branded and private-label goods which are sold to customers including independent convenience stores, grocers, leisure outlets, pubs and restaurants. The Company currently lists an extensive range of branded and own label grocery, fresh and frozen food, beers, wines, spirits, tobacco and non-food items.

Booker Wholesale and Makro operate three regional distribution centres, Hatfield and Haydock in England and Livingston in Scotland, and has a national distribution centre in Wellingborough. These distribution centres supply Booker Wholesale and two of them also handle retail deliveries.

We are privileged to serve 441,000 catering customers and 641,000 small businesses. Our catering customers include restaurants, fast food outlets, licenced premises and cost centre caterers. These can be independent, single site locations, Group Accounts and National Chains. All customers can draw upon the Booker, Makro, Classic and Chef Direct infrastructures. This has helped strengthen caterer satisfaction and grown like-for-like catering sales by 4.4%. This is despite price deflation in the catering market.

We have also made good progress with Group Accounts, such as Enterprise Group and Rick Stein, where we serve these accounts from Booker and Makro.

Our Chef Direct business, which serves national accounts from our distribution centre in Didcot, has also had a good year serving clients including Byron Burgers, Carluccios, Prezzo, Aramark and Wagamama.

The Group sells an extensive range of grocery, tobacco, alcoholic products and other products used by its customers , who are predominantly independent retailers and caterers.

The Group owns a number of "own label" brands including:

Catering brands – Chef’s Larder and Lichfields;

Wine, spirit and tobacco brands – Malt House Vinters and Chekov; and

Retail own label – Happy Shopper and Euro Shopper.

The Group employs approximately 13,000 employees. The Group is an equal opportunities employer and the Directors believe that the Group’s people are the key to the future of its business and intends to continue to develop them at all levels of the business.

We serve 94,000 independent retailers. Our largest retail customers tend to be our Premier, Londis, Budgens and Family Shopper symbol club members. We also serve our retail club members, unaffiliated independents and retail national accounts.

Premier, Booker’s symbol group, grew to 3,306 stores (3,213 stores last year). The retail development team has put a lot of work into building the sales and profits of existing Premier stores. Premier was voted the best symbol group by consumers at the CTP Awards.

Premier operates a no cost model for members, and has the advantage for retailers of providing deliveries and also the ability to top-up at their local Booker branch. We install the fascia and imagery free of charge and also provide a market leading promotion every four weeks. All goods are delivered at cash and carry prices.

We continue to develop Family Shopper, a local discount format. This is doing well. At May 2017, we have 63 stores and the response to this format has been encouraging.

On 14 September 2015 Budgens and Londis joined the Group. Budgens serves 156 retailers. The Budgens consumer is typically ABC1. Londis serves 1,850 retailers with approximately 49% of consumers being ABC1. Since completion of the acquisition, the teams at Budgens and Londis have "joined forces” with the Group. They have embraced the Booker approach to cash, customer satisfaction and health & safety. In the year we have opened a net 381 Londis and 6 Budgens outlets. As a result the sales have grown strongly.

Budgens and Londis were acquired for £40m and, to March 2017, in relation to this acquisition we have generated net cash of c.£42m.

Booker Direct serves national retail chains from our distribution centres with customers including Marks & Spencer, most of the cinema chains in the UK and the prison service in England and Wales. Together the Group can now serve any independent retailer, Group Accounts and National Chains throughout the UK.

Sales at booker.co.uk were £1,072m, up from £979m last year and £15m in 2005. All these sales are delivered to our customers’ premises. We have 569,000 customers registered on the website compared to 490,000 last year. Customers can view their account details and order products. There are double the number of stock keeping units available to a typical customer on the website through our special order system.

Ritter-Courivaud is a speciality foods supplier to the UK’s leading restaurants. Ritter had a good year growing sales through the Makro business centres and direct to customers.

In September 2009 we opened our first business centre in Mumbai. We now have four branches in Mumbai, one in Surat and one joint venture branch in Pune. These serve 21,000 customers, and have also launched 200 Happy Shopper symbol retailers which harness the lessons learned from Premier in the UK for the Kirana stores of Mumbai. We continue to review growth options in India and look forward to developing the Booker offer to become the best choice, price and service supplier to Kirana stores and caterers.