The Independent Retailer Owners Forum (IROF) met in Dublin in February to discuss, debate and review our successes and learning from the past two years of business and livelihood disruption.

The overall position for independent food retailing across Ireland is positive, with the IROF retailers thriving versus simply surviving – albeit this was the universal strategy in 2020 – and investing to hold the 2021 growth and to weather the inflation and cost increases impacting us all.

I sanity-checked my 2021 opinion pieces before the visit to see which forecasts and thinking were correct – and incorrect – and to create a ‘tick sheet’ for our store walks, huddles and the private ‘Meet the Leader’ dinner with the retailing rock star Jonathan James. More about this later.

Listening to the retailers and to our terrific forum supporters, it was clear that proprietary fresh food, customer service, retail standards, innovation and technology were the common themes.