Last Updated: March 2025
KEY SUMMARY
We use cookies on our websites which, amongst other things, help to improve your experience of our websites and to ensure that they perform as you expect. We may collect information about your computer, including, where available, your IP address (in relation to competitions only), operating system and browser type, for system administration and to report aggregate information within Premier Foods Group and to select third parties. This is statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns, and does not identify any individual. For the same reason, we may obtain information about your general internet usage.
How to contact us
If you have any questions about our Cookie Policy, please contact our Data Privacy Officer, as follows:
| By post: | Premier House, Centrium Park, Griffiths Way, St Albans, AL1 2RE | |
| By email: | [email protected] |
WHAT TYPES OF COOKIE EXIST AND WHAT DO THEY DO?
Cookies are text files containing information which are downloaded to your computer or mobile device by websites that you visit. They help us to improve our site and to deliver a better and more personalised service.
They enable us:
- To estimate our audience size and usage pattern.
- To store information about your preferences, and so allow us to customise our site according to your individual interests.
- To speed up your searches.
- To recognise you when you return to our site.
Websites must get consent to send cookies to your computer or mobile device unless the cookies are strictly necessary to provide services to you. If there are any cookies used by our websites that are deemed to be “optional”, then you can set your cookie preferences when you arrive at the website. You can also inspect and remove cookies via functionality provided by your web browser, totally independently of the website itself.
Unless the cookie is a “strictly necessary” cookie, you can withdraw your consent to our cookies at any time even if you have previously consented. Although, please do remember that if you do not consent to our functionality cookies, parts of our websites may not work.
Please note that our sites may contain links to adverts and links to websites operated by third parties. These third parties and advertisers may also use cookies. For example, we may provide YouTube videos played through our websites. In that case, YouTube will place cookies on your device, independently of our websites.
For more information about how Google & YouTube uses cookies and what information they collect, visit https://policies.google.com.
Before we explain what cookies are, we need to explain what a few commonly used terms mean:
- Affiliate - an affiliate is a website operator who can send traffic to a website using links from another website. The affiliate may be paid an agreed commission from the referral.
- First party cookies are those set by a website that is being visited by the user at the time – the website displayed in the URL window.
- Third-party cookies are cookies that are set by a domain other than that of the website being visited by the user. If a user visits a website and another entity sets a cookie through that website this would be a third-party cookie.
- Persistent cookies - these cookies remain on a user’s device for the period of time specified in the cookie. They can be referenced each time that the user visits the website that created that particular cookie to provide information across multiple visits/sessions.
- Session cookies - these cookies allow website operators to link the actions of a user during a browser session. A browser session starts when a user opens the browser window and finishes when they close the browser window. Session cookies are created temporarily. Once you close the browser, all session cookies are deleted.
THE FOUR MAIN CATEGORIES OF COOKIE
Category 1: Strictly necessary cookies
These cookies are essential for the running of a website e.g. a cookie that remembers what you’ve put into a shopping basket. Generally these cookies will be essential first-party session cookies, and if persistent or third party, there should be a good justification for this. Strictly necessary cookies will generally be used to store a unique identifier to manage and identify the user as unique to other users currently viewing the website, in order to provide a consistent and accurate service to the user.
Examples include:
- Remembering previous actions (e.g. entered text) when navigating back to a page in the same session.
- Managing and passing security tokens to different services within a website to identify the visitor’s status (e.g. logged in or not).
- To maintain tokens for the implementation of secure areas of the website.
- To route customers to specific versions/applications of a service, such as might be used during a technical migration.
These cookies will not be used:
- To gather information that could be used for marketing to the user.
- To remember customer preferences or user IDs outside a single session (unless the user has requested this function).
Category 2: Performance cookies
These cookies only collect information about website usage for the benefit of the website operator. We use them to ensure our sites are working as well as possible, for example, if there’s a really popular page then we may try to provide users with more of that sort of information. These cookies can be first or third party, session or persistent cookies. To fall within this category their usage should be limited to performance and website improvement. Any information collected by these cookies is anonymous.
Examples include:
- Web analytics – where the data collected is limited to the website operator’s use only, for managing the performance and design of a site. These cookies can be third-party cookies but the information must be for the exclusive use of the publisher of the website visited.
- Ad response rates – where the data is used exclusively for calculating response rates (click-through rates) to improve the effectiveness of advertising purchased on a site external to the destination website.
- Affiliate tracking – where the cookie is used to let affiliates know that a visitor to a site visited a partner site some time later and if that visit resulted in the use or purchase of a product or service, including details of the product and service purchased. Affiliate tracking cookies allow the affiliate to improve the effectiveness of their site.
- Error management – Measuring errors presented on a website, typically this will be to support service improvement or complaint management and will generally be closely linked with web analytics.
- Testing designs – Testing variations of design, typically using A/B or multivariate testing, to ensure a consistent look and feel is maintained for the user of the site in the current and subsequent sessions.
Category 3: Functionality cookies
These cookies are site specific and are linked to user choices for using that site, for example, language choices.
Category 4: Targeting cookies or advertising cookies
These cookies contain a unique key that is able to distinguish individual users’ browsing habits or store a code that can be translated into a set of browsing habits or preferences using information stored elsewhere, for example an online retailer could analyse your previous purchases and make suggestions based on what other purchasers of the same goods bought.