I’ve been working closely with lots of suppliers, which adds good value to my stores. We’ve been collaborating with Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) on our soft drinks, for example, and it’s helped massively with how we manage our stock. It’s also made our merchandising look much more professional. I’ve been working with crisps brands and with Cadbury as well. It’s about working with lots of categories, and whoever can add value to my store.

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People think there’s lots of value in alcohol, but soft drinks are so important for your profit line. That makes working with soft drinks suppliers paramount. It’s just such a strong category with such strong margins. We’re trying to get on top of merchandising the category, and working with CCEP has helped us to track things in the chiller. You might think that the more lines you have, the better your range will look. But that ends up with you overstocking and you’ve then got so many lines you don’t know where to put things. In turn, customers don’t know what’s there and walk out of your store without buying anything.

Less can be more

People like to see better displays with more facings of the core lines they want. It’s so easy to get a new line on promotion, and then another. Before you know it you’ve got far too many and you haven’t got time to sell them. It also affects your display. We had six flavours of Rubicon in one of our stores, which is just too many. We’ve gone down to three Rubicon now, and I might reduce it again. If I halve the number of products and double-face the bestsellers, it looks better in my chiller.

It took me eight weeks to organise new installations, deep clean the chillers and go over the display, and CCEP has been coming back and helping us with the merchandising. In total, we’ve taken 20 soft drinks lines out of the chiller to give more facings to the products that matter.

When it comes to supplier support, however, I want them to help me to grow my category, not just their brands. I want to grow energy drinks sales, not just Monster, and that means we are giving facings to Red Bull because it’s the number-one energy drink.

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