Tim Mason, the former Tesco marketing boss who led the failed attempt to conquer the US with Fresh & Easy, has insisted the chain could have succeeded and that its meltdown under its disgraced former boss Philip Clarke could have been avoided.
“It was a great business,” said Mason of Fresh & Easy, where trading losses and investment reached close to £1.8bn by the time it paid the US billionaire Ron Burkle to take the business off its hands in 2013. “There were many very good reasons, not least the economy, that meant it was somewhere between very difficult and impossible to be successful in the timeframe.”
“If Tesco had been financially stronger, the business could have taken everything it learned over six years and refined and developed the model and got it to an acceptable place,” Mason told The Grocer magazine (£). “Unfortunately there wasn’t that economic firepower. There were problems all over the place, not least in the UK, and the decision was made.”
Mason, who left Tesco at the end of 2012, spent 30 years at the company and was a member of the management team that worked alongside Sir Terry Leahy to create the UK’s biggest retailer.
He is seen as a key figure in the development of the Tesco brand. Until his US posting, he was marketing director and credited with developing the loyalty Clubcard scheme as well as helping Leahy come up with the “Every little helps” slogan in 1993 that still underpins the company’s public image.
Mason was overlooked for chief executive in favour of Clarke, who was fired in 2014. In the interview he admits: “I would love to have been Tesco CEO.”
He also makes a veiled criticism of Clarke’s reign, now infamous for the ensuing accounting scandal. “The external pressures were great, no doubt about that. But how you behave and how you perform under those pressures is the mark of the man, and it absolutely did not have to be the way it was.”
Dave Lewis, a former Unilever executive, was parachuted into replace Clarke and is approaching his second anniversary in the job. He has sold off a string of Tesco’s businesses, including its South Korean chain, to cut debts and focus on turning around its core UK retail operations.
Mason also reveals that he still takes a keen interest in Tesco products, recently texting Lewis to tell him that Tesco Finest fresh pasta with pine nuts was better than the M&S equivalent.
