Morrisons has been one of the grocery success stories of 2008, and winning The Grocer's Gold Award for the Grocer of the Year 2008 was the icing on the cake.

Nelson's last order at the Battle of Trafalgar - "engage the enemy more closely" - has real echoes today. Recent POPAI research cast the shopper in the role of the enemy for some store managers as their queries "got in the way" of the store management process (Barriers to Progress 1986).

Unilever was one of the sponsors of the MARI proof of concept trial. We participated as we were well aware of the many current concerns surrounding PoP material, not least, from our point of view, improving execution when it finally reaches the store.

Space could be the final frontier for supermarkets as the rise of non-food reaches epic proportions.

Each year hundreds of millions of pounds are invested in in-store marketing. Industry estimates place in-store spend at around 7%-8% of total marketing budgets, excluding trade-funded promotions (such as money off, bogofs etc.) with growth in excess of 20% YoY (Deloitte). To put this into perspective, cinema marketing represents 1.5%, and radio and internet advertising each account for around 5% of ad spend.

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If you treat the people around you with love and respect, they will never guess you're trying to get them sacked. Just one of the gems from the mouth of the UK's most famous business manager, David Brent (Ricky Gervais) of The Office.

This time last year all the noise was about naturalness - in food and drink, and even in alcohol, toiletries and household products.

Christmas is coming, the carp is getting fat. If that doesn't sound quite right, you're not Polish or Lithuanian. Turkey or goose may be a fait accompli for a British Christmas, but for those with Eastern European heritage the crowning glory of a Yuletide feast is a freshwater fish.

What are the favourite foods that Polish customers will be looking for this Christmas?

There's a lot of grunting and groaning, a lot of talking, but physically doing something they are finding a challenge." This is how Chris May, of leading customer management training company FXL, characterises relations between retailer buying teams and their supplier counterparts.

Have you got Christmas wrapped up this year? It's not necessarily a given that stores and suppliers always get their acts streamlined enough to really make the most of the frenetic season. The weekend before is sure to see intense shopping, although it may be tougher to predict what will happen on Christmas Eve (this year it falls on a Monday).

The lack of sun this summer has been nothing compared with the almost apocalyptic floods that hit Yorkshire and Gloucester. Some stores had water swirling around trolleys in the car park, such as Morrisons in Retford, where the warehouse was submerged in four feet of water. Luckily the store didn't lose any stock and only had to close for a day.

Defra estimates that 10.5 million tonnes of packaging entered the UK waste stream in 2006 and, according to Envirowise, the food and drink industry is responsible for 50% of it. In 2005 the Government's Waste Resources Action Plan (WRAP) developed the Courtauld Commitment as a pledge to reduce packaging waste by 2010.

You may be familiar with the old anecdote: a message saying that the General "flies back to the front" is received as "the General's flies are back to front."

Supermarket head offices are buzzing with talk about nutritional food labels, so you'd think their shoppers would be equally enthusiastic. But the truth is that they've passed some people by. "I hadn't noticed any new labels - I just thought they were now on the front of packets instead of the back," says financial secretary Laura Ashton, 28.