As you may have gathered from my last post we are holiday, this week we are visiting our elder daughter in the Netherlands. While we are here we tend to shop at Albert Heijn as they have one of their stores near our daughter’s home.

Albert Heijn is the Netherlands biggest grocer and from a UK perspective they are the Dutch stockists of the Euro Shopper range. As we are Spar supplied retailers we don’t stock Euro Shopper products and I thought it would be interesting to find out more about the brand. A search on the internet shows that the source of Euro Shopper is from AMS Sourcing BV which is a company owned by a group of supermarkets from across Europe. I was surprised to discover that Morrisons is one of the shareholders in AMS. The brand and range are available in 15 European countries (plus Curaçao – a Caribbean island) and was launched in 1996.

While staying with our daughter this week we have been using some of the Euro Shopper products have found them to be, as the AMS Sourcing website states, good quality products at low prices.

Martin Swadling, the recently appointed Head of Premier at Booker told me “Euro Shopper is exclusive to Booker in the UK. It is now a £100m brand in the UK and had a 30% growth last year. The Euro Shopper Energy Drink is the best-selling Euro Shopper product.”

Interesting.

With a gross profit margin of at least 30% and the knowledge that the Euro Shopper range is stocked in major supermarkets across Europe the question for me is should we be stocking the range?

PS. A visit to Groningen for us would not be complete without a visit to Peter van der Ley’s cheese shop. As posted here this is a cheesemongers at the top of the game. Great experience.