According to yesterday’s Observer, the UK’s Waitrose has big plans to grow domestically and internationally.

If the verbatim comments following the article are close to representative, their CEO may have hit the nail on the head.

Waitrose has developed its own label offering into a brand that is stocked in many Asian supermarket chains; think Daimaru in Japan or Cold Storage in Singapore for example.

In this sense their approach has been from different (and probably less capital intensive) than M&S who went down the route of initially opening their own stores, albeit through franchise, and watching many of them struggle.

Waitrose obviously now feel they have a better understanding of the  local shopper.