Healthy spar

Britain’s king of convenience shopping is increasing its range of own-label wines as well as redesigning its drinks department.  Robyn Lewis reports

I’LL BET YOU don’t know who has the most off-licence stores in the UK? Even when I tell you it’s the same company that’s the world’s biggest retail food chain? What about if I tell you that it was the Retail Industry Award’s "Convenience Store of the Year" both last year and this year – closer now? OK, I’ll let you in on the secret… it’s Spar.

"Really, there are 2,700 Spar stores in the UK. We are a very big player and that isn’t always recognised," says Liz Aked, trading controller at the retailer.  "We can offer a lot of bang for our bucks."

Those thousands of stores nationwide (the website claims that by sheer virtue of the number of them, that 74% of the UK population live within three-quarters of a mile of a store) are made up of stores that are owned by the parent company, stores that are owned by the six retail wholesalers, who also have the franchise to deliver to stores and, of course, the independently owned outlets.

Spar central office in the UK, where Aked is based, is where the overall policies, marketing strategies and buying is done, as well as where all the decisions concerning the Spar own-brand products are taken, in order for the fascia to have a cohesive feel across all those different convenience stores.

So, what does the range of wine look like in a Spar store, these days? Aked, in her 10 years with the company, has spent a lot of time on the own-label range of wine in particular and has managed to introduce a number of successful products under the Spar umbrella, as well as revamping the range of big name brands that are listed.  That strategy has proved to be very successful with the turnover for wine increasing by over 100% in that decade. 

"I have completely changed the range in my time," she confesses. "There was virtually no own-label and although we haven’t expanded the number of wine options available we have transferred much more into exclusives or own-labels.

That gives us a great point of difference from other retailers."  Now the range consists of about 300 wines, the average price of which is about £3.84 and around 3m cases are sold each year – 50% of which are own-label.  "We have a very tight range," says Aked.

"A supermarket might have between 800 and 1,500 different single bottles on their shelves but really 300 is a big enough range to work with in this type of store.  When you break that down into red, white, sparkling, rosé and the different styles in there, you are probably only going to be able to offer quite a narrow choice in any particular category but it works well because people are making a choice very, very quickly in this environment.

I mean people don’t generally think about what goes with this, what goes with that in this type of store format.  They just think, right I need something for whatever I’m doing now very, very quickly.  Most of the wine at Spar is bought for consumption in a very short period of time.  It’s the everyday drinking experience we cater for, not your posh dinner party or wedding anniversary purchase."

In such a limited range and with such swift choices being made, Aked admits that packaging is of the utmost importance. In terms of the ownlabel range, in particular, the look is always very carefully thought out.

"For example, we are quite discreet about the fact that it comes from Spar.  It isn’t that we are ashamed of the fact it comes from Spar," she insists. 

"It will always say Spar on the back-label but we don’t want the front label to be dominated by it and that’s something I would advocate if I were working for Sainsbury’s as well.

We have to be mindful of our customers who might be taking it to a dinner party, they might wish to be discreet about it and we want that too."  The other problem with the own range that Aked has had to overcome, is the issue of cost.

"You know in research Spar always gets hammered for being expensive but in the beer, wines and spirits department, certainly we are very, very competitive," she says.  Though she admits that, for her, it means working within very tight parameters in terms of price, and it is here that the size of the organisation really helps.

"The most expensive bottle of wine we do is a Barolo at £14.99 but that will sell in a very limited number of stores, really we are more Vin de Pays de l’Aude, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it is a lot more difficult to purchase a decent wine that retails for, say between £2.99 and £3.49.

At that price the cost price of the liquid is something like 49p. Fortunately we are at a size now where we can blend our own and so we are able to create really good value wines like our Wild River brand, which is one of our best-selling wines and is a blend that is exclusive to us – a Terret Sauvignon.

Nowhere in the world will you very often see a Terret as a dual varietal but it is a very good, soft, white wine that delivers the flavour profile that we wanted."  It seems surprising that Spar consumers would be so adventurous, given that most consumers seem happy to stick to a Chardonnay or a Merlot.

"We sell a predominance of Chardonnay just like anyone else," Aked confesses, "and 10% of the Blossom Hill that is sold in the UK, for example, is bought through us.  You know, if I am buying a brand I am looking for exactly the same thing as a supermarket, we work on the Nielsen top 20 for brands and they generate a lot of our sales.

There’s a lot of talk about the convenience consumer but in actual fact they are just a supermarket customer who happens to be in a bit of a rush. It isn’t as if they have two heads or anything and maybe they haven’t been as adventurous as we’d like them to be but it isn’t as if the opportunity isn’t there."

Having said that, the real challenge for Aked is to get her customers into the department in the first place, never mind trying to educate them into new varietals, as only about 35% of Spar customers actually buy wine in store.

"Our first challenge is definitely to put it more in their face so that they think, ‘Yeah maybe I do deserve a bottle of wine’. It’s reminding them the department is there and persuading them to come in for a kick-off."

And after that? "Well, we need to make sure that they don’t get lost, even though there are only 300 wines, consumers can get bored and diverted when looking at row after row of bottles.

We’ve put in place new store designs as part of our millennium store project and part of that is a real focus on this department.  There is a pre-requisite for an open chiller cabinet and images that we hope will instil the idea of everyday drinking occasions in the mind of the consumer.

We very much wanted the deign to be light, clean and contemporary looking, easy to understand but not talking down to them and not trying to educate them that much.  That’s the strategy really, and to provide good quality, good value wines.

It’s not rocket science."  Ah, well you see, some might just disagree with that.