EUAN Sutherland, the Scot who heads Co-operative Group, has admitted it has lost touch with its customers as he seeks to rebuild it after losing control of Co-operative Bank.
The group has launched an online nationwide poll about its future.
Co-op has more than 400 food stores, 120 funeral homes, and more than 60 pharmacies in Scotland.
Mr Sutherland said: "We will be asking people up and down the country what they believe the Co-operative should really stand for.
"This is an unprecedented move for an organisation of the size and the scale of the Co-operative and the results will feed directly into our wider review of strategy and purpose.
"In recent years the Co-operative has lost touch with its customers and members and with the communities in which it operates: we haven't been listening."
The survey at www.haveyoursay.coop asks questions from how to improve its goods and services, and how Co-op shares its profits to whether the Co-op should make political donations.
The food-to-funerals group is preparing to reveal results for 2013 at the end of next month, figures that will be "pretty ugly" due to the rescue of its bank arm, according to Mr Sutherland.
After failing to pull off a deal to buy 631 branches from Lloyds Banking Group, including the former Lloyds TSB Scotland business, Co-op revealed last year it had a £1.5 billion capital shortfall.
The restructuring of the business has seen it fall under the control of bondholders.
Former bank chairman Paul Flowers is being investigated by the police for allegedly buying illegal drugs.
The group now faces a raft of inquiries into what went wrong at the bank.
But its 2800-store food chain had relatively "strong" Christmas trading after like-for-like sales rose 1% in the 13 weeks to January 4.
Mr Sutherland said last summer that it could take four years to turn around the group.
The Edinburgh-born executive was recruited from retailer Kingfisher, owner of do-it-yourself chain B&Q in the UK, to succeed Peter Marks who retired.
He was raised in North Berwick and Bearsden, Glasgow, and worked at retailer Alliance Boots and soft drinks giant Coca-Cola before joining Kingfisher where he is chief operating officer.
There are around 475,000 Co-operative Group members in Scotland.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article