Grampian drives cooked meat availability at Asda

A shelf-ready packaging (SRP) project spearheaded by Grampian Country Food Group has helped Asda achieve an annualised sales uplift of £6m in the cooked meats category.

The two companies, which picked up the availability prize at the IGD think tank’s food industry awards this year, boosted on-shelf availability from less than 70% to 92% after displaying standard lines in specially designed plastic trays inside cardboard boxes and premium lines in cardboard shelf-ready packs.

Before the switch, when product was stacked horizontally on shelf, Asda was achieving a 97% success rate in delivering cooked meats to stores, but only managing on-shelf availability of 65% at key times of the day. After the change, on-shelf availability went up to 92%, while the product was also far more visible to the customer.

The new packaging has now been rolled out across the entire cooked meats category through collaboration between Asda, Grampian (as category champions) and seven other suppliers.

Meanwhile, Tesco has continued to run night-time shelf replenishment exercises with suppliers at its larger stores to help them develop the best SRP solutions as it presses on with plans to switch 10,000 lines into this format by the end of next year, said IGD programme leader Tarun Patel.

While progress had been made on many lines, there were still hurdles to overcome on frozen food, hanging products such as bagged sweets and very small items, he said.

One senior executive at a leading branded supplier claimed that SRP was currently the “number one priority at Tesco, well ahead of radio frequency identification tagging (RFID)”. She added: “It’s going to cost us millions to modify our packing equipment to switch to SRP, but we have to do it to remain competitive and maintain customer relationships. I can see the advantages, but building a business case has been difficult.”

Patel said suppliers needed to “understand how to offset the impact of the additional costs incurred through switching to SRP through better availability and branding and merchandising opportunities”