Convenience retail is key for ‘individual’ wine brands, The Co-op claims

The convenience channels could prove the best route to market for more individual wine producers, The Co-op’s BWS boss has claimed.

Simon Cairns, head of beers wines and spirits at The Co-op said convenience had advantages over other types of retailers as it tapped into the twin trends for impulse buying and top-up shopping, which had been fuelling changing shopper behaviour.

“There’s a lot of potential in convenience – those instant purchases where you have the right wine for the wine occasion,” he said. “Convenience is unique in that you don’t have the blocks by country that you have in a traditional supermarket – you don’t have the bays of Chile, Australia and New Zealand, We have a fixture that the consumer scan stand in front of and see the entire range in one field of view.”

One benefit – as well as a necessity – is a tighter range, he pointed out, with convenience retailers not only having to make the space itself work harder, but also not having room for any duplication.

“We don’t have the luxury of multiples representations of any one given wine or varietal – we have one Chablis or Côtes du Rhône, not multiples of them – so what we increasingly try to do is work with winemakers at the top of their game.”

“We want to start to say that convenience could be the answer to if you want something with identity that has a story behind it and a producer, it could be the route to market for those kinds of products,” he said.

“If you take the duplication of say a Sauvignon Blanc, you can have an entry level from Chile, a mid-tier from France and a premium from New Zealand – and in place of the duplication, you can have something else in there – something for a more progressive shopper, like a Verdiccio – that satisfies the customers’ need.”

He said changing consumers habits and the rise of convenience shopping had helped boost The Co-op ‘s market share to 6.1% according to the latest data from Kantar Worldpanel. In the 3 months to 27 March, the retailer saw overall sales increase by 3.9% – its fastest growth since buying out Somerfield in 2011. The retailer “massively” overtrades in wine, Cairns admits, which provides a halo effect across the store.

“Within that [trend] what we try to do is offer points of difference on the high street in terms of our range,” he said. “We want to offer range breath without depth as we can’t afford to have multiple references to the same thing – we have to offer as diverse a range as we possibly can.”

In the last few weeks, the convenience specialist introduced a more focused approach to ranging, its 2,700-strong estate, with different wines available to groups or ‘clusters’ of stores depending on the store’s location and demographic.