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Publishing its financial statement for the year ending 30 April 2023, the company said pre-tax profits had increased by 10.3% to £3.7m and net turnover was up 4.2% to £221.3m.
The group said the results had been delivered in the face of 12 months of continual change, a challenging economic climate and record food price inflation.
Although the relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions saw a return to some pre-pandemic shopping behaviours, the habits of shopping locally were retained by a noticeable proportion of consumers, it added.
Last week the company also announced the acquisition of family owned Glasgow-based convenience chain Scotfresh.
The acquisition will see the nine Scotfresh-branded stores and 130 staff move over to CJ Lang.
The wholesaler also expanded its independent Spar store estate – with a net total of 11 stores joining during the year – and has been working to implement consistent brand standards across the group.
Chief executive Colin McLean told TalkingRetail.com: “The business is certainly moving in the right direction. We have got a clear strategy, a strong team, and we know where we are trying to take the business.”
Being a Scottish-owned company, he claimed, meant CJ Lang understood the market north of the border better than most, giving it a genuine competitive advantage.
“We have invested some serious money and the business really is motoring at the moment,” he said.
A further initiative has been the development of a new-look CJ’s’ food-to-go offer, which was recently launched at the company’s store in Garthamlock, Glasgow.
“Record levels of business investment also include new forecasting and demand-planning systems being implemented for improved end-to-end customer availability from supplier, warehousing and into Spar stores,” McLean added.
“We continued to grow our independent customer base and make improvements to our offer to meet the changing customer needs within convenience retailing. We are now attracting the very best of Scottish retailers to join Spar Scotland.”
He said the independent business remained strong, showing double-digit growth during the year, a trajectory that has been maintained into the current financial year.
But the company says it is focused on quality rather than quantity when signing up new stores. Chairman Jim Hepburn said: “We have taken strong action against a number of retailers who were not keeping up the standards.”
In the past 12 months, this has included 12 stores having their fascias removed.
CJ Lang has also been focused on moving away from declining categories such as news and magazines and into growing areas such as food-to-go. As a result, profit margins grew by 0.9% during the year.
It aims to grow food-to-go sales into a £25m business, and McLean said: “We’re not there yet, but we are making good progress.”
Challenges during the year included high crime levels in certain areas, while the group had also faced uncertainty over the planned implementation of a deposit return scheme for single-use drinks containers in Scotland, before the legislation was eventually put on hold in June this year.
“We were within minutes of signing off a lot of capital investment in big reverse vending machines,” McLean revealed.
