My hypothesis for improving confectionery sales is that by giving more facings to our best sellers we will sell more of them. This clearly requires making some sacrifices of the poorest performers and therefore I need to understand how I should identify these products.

I have produced my space/cost rule and have now measured each of the products in our range and compared their weekly cost against their weekly profit performance. My rule is if a product doesn’t break even then it goes.

I have identified 29 lines for the chop and these include products from all of the biggest manufacturers; Mars Planets and Mars Delight from Master Foods, Fry’s Chocolate Cream and Bourneville 45g from Cadbury, Toffee Crisp from Nestlé and Toblerone and Milka Daim from Kraft.

Once we have sold through most of each line we are starting to change our display merchandising by increasing the facings we give to our best sellers. Our Number One confectionery product is 250g Cadbury Dairy Milk and we have quickly been able to find a second top row space for it. Other products will benefit as more space is released until at least the top dozen lines get the extra space they deserve.

As I said earlier this month I will report the initial results at the end September.