Sales growth
The last 12 months have been another year of progress. We successfully pursued our objective of growing sales profitably through multiple channels to customers and we have continued to reshape our cost base leading to an improvement in earnings.
378 stores across the UK and the Republic of Ireland. there was a net reduction in the size of the estate as we closed noncore outlets.
The like-for-like sales increase for the full year of 2.6% was encouraging, especially since it occurred in a fairly uniform manner after the end of the very hot summer last year. This improvement was driven by continuing but focused product development and improved performance management, training and recruitment in the stores.
In the last year, we relaunched our Continental boxed chocolate range, as well as repackaging our Classics boxed chocolates and our Special Toffee. We also launched two new boxed chocolate collections: Dessert Gallery and Cool Fruits. Dessert Gallery is a collection of dessert centres in milk, dark and white chocolate cups; centres include Tiramasu, Summer Fruit Pudding and Crème Br?lée. Cool Fruits are milk chocolate cups, filled with Double Cream & Blackcurrant, Mango, Lemon or Strawberry Mousse and then topped with a fruit jelly, which become “mouthfuls of frozen heaven” when kept in the freezer.
The commercial channel enjoyed the greatest sales growth in the last year. This is driven by a combination of our strong relationship with Marks & Spencer and evolving the range and distribution of Thorntons branded products through other retailers.
Finally, the Gift Delivery Service experienced its lowest level of sales growth since it was established in the late 1990s.Therefore, we have put a number of chang ...