Tesco has made a £155.6m offer for the Dobbies Garden Centre chain in order to increase its range of environmentally-friendly products, including timber garden products.
The supermarket chain, which already sells wood-based garden furniture in some stores and via its website, has claimed that garden centres are ideally placed to help it achieve its aim of increasing its range of green products and that Dobbies, which stocks pine, teak, mahogany and iroko garden furniture, timber screens and trellises and other wood-based garden items, is an “exciting opportunity for Tesco”.
“The increasing popularity of gardening, and in particular the trend towards environmentally-friendly products, makes this an attractive sector for Tesco to invest in,” said chief executive Sir Terry Leahy.
“Garden centres are ideally placed to support this because for many people gardening is the way they express their desire to be green.”
In April 2006, Tesco was praised in the Greenpeace League Table of Garden Furniture Retailers for only stocking FSC-certified products and has also started to use timber in the construction of its supermarkets in order to improve its environmental credentials.
