FROM THE STORE OF NOW TO THE STORE OF OUR FUTURE

Chris Hayward, IGD Sales Director 

Whilst online has grown massively, ‘Bricks and Mortar’ stores are still key was the message from Chris Hayward from IGD when he joined us this week for the BFFF Business Conference. The focus for physical stores will be to ensure space is re-purposed combined with ensuring ‘ranging’ is fit for purpose. IGD sees that ‘ranging’ is going to be reduced and that as counters come out of stores – how this space is used will be critical.

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THE ONLINE GROCERY JOURNEY

Duncan Cross, Category Director of Frozen at Asda

We were fortunate to be joined on the BFFF Business Conference by Duncan Cross, Category Director of Frozen at Asda.

He highlighted that pre-Pandemic online accounted for 20% of their grocery sales – this has now jumped to 33% with some categories even hitting 40%.

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AN UP TO DATE VIEW OF THE GROCERY SCENE

Carol Redman, Business Unit Director, Kantar

In the last 4-week period to 21.03.21 there has been a 6% decline in Total Grocery Sales. However, this needs to be placed into context as this time last year saw the massive spike in Retail Sales. If you compare to 2019 the market is up by 15.6%.

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HEALTHY EATING MADE EASY

Myles Hopper, Co-Founder, Mindful Chef

We were joined on the BFFF Business Conference by Myles Hopper, one of the founders, of Mindful Chef.  It was interesting to hear Myles explaining the ethos behind the brand and that healthy eating is central to their proposition.

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We were joined on the BFFF Business Conference by Myles Hopper, one of the founders, of Mindful Chef.

It was interesting to hear Myles explaining the ethos behind the brand and that healthy eating is central to their proposition.

Their fresh recipe boxes help consumers not only control their food waste but also encourage people to cook. However, they also see their frozen meal range as being central to their growth strategy. Indeed, Myles highlighted that frozen had played a key role in the growth they achieved in 2020.

Also, that frozen will be expanded into other meal occasions and it gives them the opportunity to place their products where there is consumer demand such as offices and gyms.

The presentation from this year’s Frozen Food Business Conference will be made available to all attendees.  If you were not able to purchase a ticket, please contact Siobhan O’Callaghan.

We were joined by Kantar on this week’s BFFF Business Conference with Carol Redman, Business Unit Director, giving us an update on current market data.

In the last 4-week period to 21.03.21 there has been a 6% decline in Total Grocery Sales. However, this needs to be placed into context as this time last year saw the massive spike in Retail Sales. If you compare to 2019 the market is up by 15.6%.

There are early signs that frequency of shopping trips is going up with basket spend coming down.

All retailers and channels are down year on year with the exception of Ocado and Online. Carol made the point that Online Sales are not yet annualising the period of very strong sales that will come later in 2021.

There is early evidence of consumers returning to stores that had lost footfall during the Pandemic, notably the discounters.

Data suggests that those over 55’s have started to return to physical stores, presumably driven by the confidence out of the Vaccination programme.

Frozen had a very positive year and saw not only positive value and volume growth but the category saw higher trip frequency whilst at a Total Grocery level trips were down year on year (52 week data).

We also saw frozen being used in more meal occasions up by +21% which is higher than both Ambient and Fresh Food.

Frozen is also seen as more relevant to young consumers and our category may benefit from the fact that 91% of respondents want to work from home more than they did pre-Pandemic. However, one area of concern is that 25% of the sales growth on frozen in 2020 came from feeding children at home.

The presentation from this year’s Frozen Food Business Conference will be made available to all attendees.  If you were not able to purchase a ticket, please contact Siobhan O’Callaghan.

We were fortunate to be joined on the BFFF Business Conference by Duncan Cross, Category Director of Frozen at Asda.

He highlighted that pre-Pandemic online accounted for 20% of their grocery sales – this has now jumped to 33% with some categories even hitting 40%.

The growth in their online has been amazing. In February 2020 they did 600,000 orders per week and now are nearing 1 million with plans to take this to 1.5 million in the near term.

This has meant that Asda have had to re-engineer product flows and picking operations to drive efficiency and cost.

This new Asda shopper online is more affluent than a store shopper and buys more brands plus premium own labels.

Asda are number two online to volume but number three on value having just lost the number two position to Sainsbury’s.

Duncan shared some good insight on how vendors need to ensure their resource reflects the role that online now plays in the Asda sales mix.

The presentation from this year’s Frozen Food Business Conference will be made available to all attendees.  If you were not able to purchase a ticket, please contact Siobhan O’Callaghan.