Team size: approximately 130 in the UK and internationally (including lawyers and support staff) 

What significant projects or deals has the legal team worked on in the past year?  Can you provide examples of successful outcomes or major accomplishments? 

Here is a short overview of the key matters we have been supporting over the past year across the 55 countries that Associated British Food (ABF) operates in: 

Primark 

Primark digitalisation continues to be a key workstream for ABF Legal.  Primark recently announced that we will be expanding Click + Collect to all our stores in England, Scotland and Wales and will be extending our product on offer to include menswear and selected home and lifestyle products. This will be a phased rollout to our 184 stores across Great Britain later this year.  We have been giving a lot of support on warehouse automation too. 

There have also been numerous new services offerings for augmenting the in-store experience.  These have included collaborations such as the Lion King-themed café in Manchester announced recently, nail bars, and vintage clothing offerings via WornWell. 

Grocery  

The Grocery legal team has supported on a broad range of matters including new distribution, logistics, third- party manufacturing, and sales contracts, various IT system implementation and software agreements, and several factory expansions and upgrades. A particular focus has been on supporting ABF’s businesses through the various supply chain challenges resulting from the Ukraine war and associated inflationary pressures. Working closely with the marketing teams, we have helped launch numerous new product lines and advised on multiple advertising and product claims. We have also successfully challenged several brand ‘copycats’, ensuring the protection of our core IP, and brand equity. The acquisition by AB World Foods of Latin American brand Capsicana brought together our Commercial, IP, and M&A teams. We helped the business to smoothly transition all customer contracts, third party manufacturing, brands and employees without interruption to trade or any disputes. 

Carbon-reduction capex projects 

The Legal team is supporting British Sugar in making a multi-million-pound investment to install a new steam drying plant at its Wissington factory for reducing CO2e emissions by 50,000 tonnes per annum by 2026/27.  This is in addition to the GBP 17 million invested recently to install a new evaporator and associated equipment at Wissington, which is reducing its steam usage by 25% during its annual sugar beet campaign (i.e. harvest and sugar production). A similar evaporator project at the Bury St Edmunds factory is also planned to go live for 2025/26. 

M&A 

It has been a busy year once again for our in-house M&A lawyers.  In addition to Capsicana (mentioned above), ABF completed a recommended GBP 48 million cash offer for National Milk Records plc, a dairy tech firm, which is being integrated into the AB Agri division.  

Are there any team members with expertise in niche areas who are critical to the company’s operations?  

In 2021, Paul Lister (ABF’s Director of Legal Services and Company Secretary) decided to establish a new team within ABF Legal, focused exclusively on the management of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) legal risk globally across the ABF group. The creation of Primark’s Ethical Trade Team decades ago was innovative at the time. Legal has worked closely with it throughout since this time and the creation of a dedicated legal team continues this innovation. This reflects ABF’s commitment to corporate responsibility and an early recognition of how in-house legal teams would need to respond to the new demands and risks presented by emerging ESG regulation. The ESG Legal Team now comprises several lawyers and is a key component of the group’s ESG governance structure, providing specialist legal advice to the ABF Corporate Responsibility Hub and other central group functions.  They also work alongside ABF Legal’s commercial and compliance teams globally on ESG matters affecting group businesses.  

The ESG Legal Team is central to group projects that are delivering the operational changes needed to comply with corporate reporting and supply chain due diligence laws, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and Deforestation Regulation.  It also provides specialist support where environmental and social impacts occur in our business’s operations or supply chains, and in response to litigation risks such as greenwashing laws. The team also manages the ABF Food Law Programme, which provides specialist in-house food law advice to all ABF group businesses. 

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?  

Over the past few years, ABF Legal has launched several apprenticeship and outreach initiatives, enthusiastically supported by many people across the team. We see these initiatives as vital for doing our part to expand pathways for entering the legal profession in the UK. The team also benefits – people share a common purpose which brings them closer together and exposes them to different experiences and perspectives. In particular, following the success of our first two apprentices who arrived in 2021, the London-based team has recruited two more solicitor apprentices this year. They will spend six years working with all parts of the Legal team and on matters covering all our Group companies, following which they will gain full qualification as solicitors.   

Prior to our recruitment process, we also partnered with a charity called Causeway to help share knowledge with state schools about what following a solicitor apprenticeship career inhouse involves. This included online sessions plus 20 school pupils spending a day at our offices to gain first-hand experience of ABF, and learn more about how to navigate apprenticeship recruitment processes in general.  

The Legal team is also continuing, in partnership with a diversity, inclusion and social mobility charity called GROW, to mentor more than 20 university students interested in a legal career. We are also undertaking various access projects with a local state school, such as legal career advice and our ABF Legal Work Experience Programme.   

We will work with Causeway and GROW to further expand our reach next year, and we continue to look for ways to improve our work in this space.