Bestway boss to support independent shops through wholesale investment

Bestway managing director, Dawood Pervez, has revealed that it will be supporting independent shops this summer through further investment in the wholesale sector.

According to a report from The Times, Britain’s second-biggest wholesaler (after Tesco’s Booker), is now calling on the government and consumers to support wholesalers by keeping local convenience stores in business.

With rising costs impacting thousands of local and independent shops across Britain, more shops shut down last year than at any other point in the past five years, the report claims.

Bestway is a £4.5 billion multinational group spanning groceries, banking and cement – but despite the company’s size, Pervez believes Bestway is still a relatively small business and that there are “massive” opportunities for growth.

“People need to understand the role and the importance of wholesale and how big it is,” CEO Dawood Pervez told The Times.

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“People do not realise how important they are, and the role they play across the UK, until they’re gone.”

The government needs to “have a real mandate” to look at the systems in place, according to Pervez, but it is “scared of big businesses and scared of losing investment”.

“We invented modern wholesaling as it is known today,” he added.

“In the Seventies and Eighties we gave a lot of people the opportunity to open shops and make a good living off the back of it. It’s a massive ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of people that have become entrepreneurs and gone on to greater things.”

“We’ve got four major lines of business at the moment and we continue to be committed to all of them and to control them and do the best we can for each one,” he said.

“In wholesale, we still see plenty of room to grow, whether it be with our existing focus on retailers, or adjacent areas such as servicing pubs, clubs that allow restaurants, cafés and caterers and foodservice operators.”

It comes as The Bestway Foundation has donated £100,000 to the UK’s largest children’s charity, Barnardo’s, through its latest round of fundraising.