Asda chief financial officer Michael Gleeson has defended the grocer’s move to inject an emergency £30m to improve the in-store experience after GMB Union branded the investment a “drop in the ocean”.

The package will be invested in colleague hours to improve the replenishment of stock, increase the number of staff on checkouts, and ensure stores are clean.

It comes on top of Asda’s £50m store upgrade programme, designed to improve the shopping experience for customers in its larger supermarkets and superstores.

However, GMB Union told trade publication The Grocer that the investment is just a “drop in the ocean” in comparison to what would be needed to transform the supermarket.

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Questioned over the investment, Gleeson said “it is the right thing to do,” adding that Asda “will always be looking at ways to improve processes to use technology to make it easier for customers and colleagues”.

He said the £30m figure partly reflects “the scale of change the company is going through”.

“From time to time, it’s right to stand back and reassess. It’s a completely normal thing to do,” he assured.

“When hours have come out of the stores in Asda over the last couple of years, it has been very front end focus. It’s been in response to moves from manned to self-checkouts. So, it hasn’t been just a withdrawal of hours, it’s been a reduction in response to change in activity and change of focus.

“It is a significant investment, an important one, and hopefully sets us up well for the second half of the year, particularly as we complete Project Future,” Gleeson added.

Project Future – Europe’s largest IT transformation project – includes changes to 2,500 systems across every part of the business to deliver a cloud-based infrastructure and a step-change in Asda’s data capabilities and customer experience to drive “competitive edge”, with the implementation to complete by the end of the year.