A TRIP to the local J Sainsbury supermarket would have been a frustrating experience for Islington’s chattering classes last Wednesday.

At 4.30 in the afternoon there was no basil to put in that home-made pesto, or Galia melon to accompany the prosciutto ham. And if they had hoped to tidy up their beards they would have had to make do with a blunt razor they should have changed weeks ago.

They probably needed to calm themselves with a cup of tea. But, no, they couldn’t. The shop was out of Twinings Earl Grey teabags.

Justin King, the newly appointed chief executive of Sainsbury, is fully aware of the group’s logistics problems. But this weekend he has even more important things on his mind.

In 10 days he will step into the auditorium at Sainsbury’s £150m headquarters and outline his plans to revive the retailer’s fortunes to a sceptical City audience.

With analysts slashing their pre-tax profit forecasts by as much as half (with the encouragement it seems of Sainsbury), the company’s shares trading at a year low, and bidders, including Permira, circling, King knows a lot is riding on next week’s performance.

Unfortunately for him, the group’s investors and family shareholders are growing impatient. It is almost four years to the day since they were reassured that the recovery plan was on track by Sir Peter Davis, the former chief executive who has now left the group.

On October 18, 2000 he said: “I am pleased with the progress we are making on our three-year plan to restore Sainsbury’s supermarkets. Our objective is to generate operating margins comparable with the industry leaders by the end of this investment period.”

Davis quickly dropped his promise to deliver industry-leading margins. And despite investing more than £3 billion on updating the group’s stores, IT and distribution systems, Sainsbury has continued to haemorrhage sales. In fact, many would argue that the company is in as much of a mess as it was four years ago.

Andrew Fowler, retail analyst at Merrill, recently wrote: “The two profit warnings Sainsbury has made so far in 2004 are only the latest in a long line during the past decade, when UK PBIT (profit before interest and tax) has almost halved, and £7.6 billion has been invested. By any yardstick, after such a decade Sainsbury is a troubled business.”

Over the past decade the group has lost its place as Britain’s largest supermarket and been relegated to third place, behind Tesco and Asda, with a merged Morrison and Safeway now threatening to push Sainsbury into fourth place.

Richard Hyman, chairman of Verdict Research, is even more damning. “Sainsbury is paying the price for being insular and inward looking for many years. The retailer is living in the past,” he said.

So what can King do to put Sainsbury back on track? He has already made some changes. Within weeks of arriving he had cut what he dubbed “bonkers prices”. (Many were identified by his wife, who dutifully became a Sainsbury shopper after his appointment.) But King has not stopped there.