Since introducing a bay specifically for chilled promotions in January Harj has seen these products get a year-on-year sales uplift of 7% in his chilled category. Here he tells us how:

While most retailers have ambient promotion bays, it’s harder to get it right in cross-category chilled products, and that’s chiefly down to space.

What I did started out as a bit of an accident. I bought a 2-metre fridge to use for snacking products – sandwiches, Yazzoo, anything you’d have at lunch.

We had the fridge installed but didn’t have our snacking range prepared, so instead we decided to put all of our 28 chilled promotions we had through Nisa’s leaflets on offer in the fridge instead. It means these products were taken from their normal place in the shop and put with products from other categories.

It’s been a great way of upselling. We have chicken korma ready meals at two-for-£5 and naan breads for £1. Since we did this we’ve been selling 20-30 more naan breads a week. In total our year-on-year sales uplift on chilled has been 7%.

The reason it works is that it puts all the promos in one place, rather than a customer having to shop for every product. If someone wants some margarine, they will go to the margarine display. But with our cross-category display people have been grabbing this, and grabbing that. Someone who came into the shop not looking to buy yogurt normally wouldn’t buy any, but if they see it on promotion, they might, and that’s where the additional sales are from.

We are still going to use this fridge for snacking, as we originally intended to, but we are also going to open up a whole bay section dedicated to chilled promotions.

Here’s my advice for setting up a cross-category chilled promotional bay:

• Make sure it’s clean and tidy
• Have it arranged over three or four shelves
• Don’t put too many products in there
• Try to group products by category as much as possible – you don’t want cheese and yogurt all crammed onto the same shelf, for instance