Toast - Woolworths
Woolworths was once a family favourite with well over 1,000 UK stores selling everything from kitchenware to pick and mix. So, why did the business collapse when other general retailers were on the rise?
The BBC Business journalist, Sean Farrington, charts the company's highs and lows before asking 'what went wrong at Woolies?'.
Alongside him is the entrepreneur, Sam White, who at the end of the show has to reach her own conclusions, based only on what she has heard and her own business acumen.
Sean and Sam hear from expert guests including:
- Richard Hawkins - an honorary research fellow at the University of Wolverhampton and president of the marketing history organisation, Charm, who has written about the company?s early days
- Clare Bailey - a retail consultant who was employed by Woolworths
- Claire Robertson - whose retail career began with a Saturday job at her local Woolies and led to her running a spin-off business (called 'Wellworths') after the original failed.
- Tony Page - Commercial and Marketing Director at Woolworths from 2006 who tried to save the business after it went into administration
Produced by Jon Douglas, Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
You can email the programme at [email protected]
Feel free to suggest topics which could be covered in future episodes.
Sliced Bread
While Sliced Bread takes a break we serve up Toast. A study of the spectacular failures of brands which had promised so much to consumers.
In each episode, the presenter and BBC business journalist Sean Farrington examines one big idea. What did it promise? Why did people back it? Why did they get burnt?
Some of the world’s most successful businesses have also brought us some of the world’s most remarkable failures. So, what led them to be toast? And what can we learn from their stories today? Sean unpicks all the early optimism, hype and ambition. He learns about the tremendous success of a brand before hearing how it faltered, with help from expert commentators and people who were directly involved. How do they view things now and what, if anything, could have been done differently?
The self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur, Sam White, is alongside him, analysing the missteps that changed a brand’s fortunes and reaching her own, often instructive, conclusions.
From big tech to high street retail and, of course, food, Toast tackles the business ideas that, one way or another, ended up cooked.
Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations on 3 July, 2025. In the new series, Greg Foot will investigate more of the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread.
In the meantime, Toast is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds. For this brand new series of Toast, episodes will be released weekly on Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts. But if you’re in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode on BBC Sounds first, a week earlier than anywhere else.
Toast is a BBC Audio North production for BBC Radio 4.
- No. of episodes: 159
- Latest episode: 2025-06-12
- Health & Fitness Science
Where can you listen?
