Budgens retailer Sid believes retailers need to keep innovating and make the most of their assets
As we all know convenience is changing rapidly, each week seems to bring a new development for small retailers to have to adapt to, and it’s more important than ever before to sweat your assets.
We are just about to embark on another initiative to ensure that we are playing at the top of our game in the four areas that we consider will be key to our business going forward: food to go, food for later, alcohol and vaping. All of these categories generate high cash margins, but they need to be managed correctly, given the right amount of visibility and include new and innovative products to really grab shoppers’ attention.
For example, with food to go, we’re adding some new products including a F’Real milkshakes, and in the past few months brought in Tango Ice Blast, which has so far been doing well.
On alcohol, we’re re-merchandising quite a bit, introducing a new gravity-led chiller which should really improve the overall display and we’re working with Brown-Forman on merchandising and staff training, too. We’ll also be running high-impact cross-category promotions with the food-for-later category.
We have significant plans to develop our vaping offer, too. Vape is a huge category for us now with weekly sales of more than £2,500 and in my opinion there’s massive opportunity to grow well beyond that, which is amazing considering vape sales generate about 60% POR.
I’ll keep the plans under wraps for now, but let’s just say there’s going to be big and exciting changes so check out my next column for more details.
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