Consumer Complaints Disclosure Standard

The Commission has developed this draft consumer complaints disclosure standard to allow us to monitor two areas of particular concern – pricing integrity issues and promotional errors – alongside other areas of the regulated grocery retailer (RGR)’s service quality such as product quality and product range. It applies to the three RGRs as defined in the Act – Foodstuffs North Island, Foodstuffs South Island, and Woolworths New Zealand, and their franchisees, interconnected bodies corporate, and transacting shareholders. The focus is on the Pak’nSave, New World, and Woolworths/Countdown banners.

We consider that the draft Disclosure Standard will assist the Commission to better monitor competition and efficiency in the grocery industry by enabling it to:

• track the types and trends of complaints that consumers are making to the RGRs and how RGRs are responding to the complaints;
• monitor the RGRs’ establishment and maintenance of systems and processes for accurately and reliably recording and categorising customer complaints; and
• compare the refund policies offered by each RGR (under their respective banners) and determine whether the refund policies are being adequately promoted to consumers.
• compare the service quality of the shopping experience provided by each RGR.

We want to hear from you

In July 2024, the Grocery Commissioner wrote to all three RGRs about our ongoing concerns around pricing integrity issues in their supermarkets and stated that we were considering establishing a disclosure standard. In that letter, the Commission stated that we would publish a discussion paper on a consumer complaints disclosure standard later in 2024.  We have chosen to proceed directly to publishing a draft Consumer Complaints Disclosure Standard and draft Reasons Paper as the issues surrounding the pricing and promotional practices of RGRs are well-known and the RGRs have known about our concerns for some time.

The draft Reasons Paper outlines the context for the disclosure standard as well as the legal framework, and draft reasoning for the content of the Disclosure standard. The draft Disclosure Standard sets out and the information that would be required to be disclosed and/or published by the RGRs and how.

We invite all parties to submit their views on the Draft Consumer Complaints Disclosure Standard and Draft Reasons Paper. We are interested in hearing from a wide range of stakeholders during this public consultation. For example, we want to understand the potential value of making consumer complaint information publicly available and the extent to which this would encourage greater consumer engagement and ultimately support the Commission’s monitoring function.

Please email your submission to grocery.regulation@comcom.govt.nz and include ‘Consumer Complaints Disclosure Standard submission’ in the subject line of your email.

Submissions are due by 5pm on Wednesday 19 February 2025.

We intend to publish all submissions on our website, unless you indicate to us that your submission, or parts of it, are confidential. When providing a submission that is not labelled as confidential, please confirm in the cover email that you are happy for that submission to be published on our website. If it is necessary to include confidential material in a submission, the information should be clearly marked, and both confidential and public versions of the submission should be provided and clearly labelled.

You can also contact us at grocery.regulation@comcom.govt.nz at any time if you have questions. Alternatively, if you would like to contact us anonymously you can do this through the Anonymous Reporting Tool.