Thanks to everyone who took part in our study tour to Stockholm last week. There’s no better way of meeting colleagues from the industry and discussing common issues than when you’re in stores looking at good practice from another market. The fresh perspective certainly opens people’s minds and always leads to some really positive conversations. We have A LOT of photos and content on our member portal so take a look at those to find out a bit more detail on the convenience market in Stockholm. I want to reflect on three things: innovation, sustainability and food.
At our Conference in April, Paul Dobson from Morrisons (who was also on this trip) talked about innovation being a muscle to build and tone by making lots of small practical changes, trying them and evaluating them. That really hit home for me – I’ve always been sceptical of siloed innovation processes especially in an industry like ours which is at its best when it’s reacting to the consumer in real time. One innovation that we all noted in Stockholm was a customer-operated unit for reducing items approaching their off-sale date. The customer can scan the product and enter the off-sale date, and if it’s close to that a discount is given and a ticket printed out with the lower price. Honestly if you’ve understood this from that description you’re doing well, but there’s a film on the ACS portal to help. The benefits of this appear pretty compelling: saved colleague time from stickering reduced items, no displays with a disconcerting number of reduced stickers, more full price sales for customers who aren’t seeking a discount, more chances for shoppers who are looking for a reduced price to find these in the store and get great value, and of course it can be a big part of a zero food waste strategy (something every retailer should be working towards).
That leads on to my second observation: my assumptions about Sweden being an enlightened society thinking deeply about sustainability may have been simplistic, I saw loads of wasted energy and a DRS scheme that seemed to ignore on-the-go consumption. There were countless dump-bins in most of the stores we saw (fine, of course, if that’s you in-store marketing tactic of choice) many of which were open-topped chilled bins. What? ACS study tours went through a phase about ten years ago of being a continuous debate about chiller doors, held across a variety of European locations where they all seemed to have grasped the nettle on this key cost-saving and sustainability measure. Everyone thinks chiller doors are a good idea now, but it seems like there are blind eyes being turned on these chilled dump bins. Maybe the supplier funding is too tempting, maybe Sweden’s renewable energy success is so great that nobody worries about energy costs, or maybe I’m doing these units a disservice and they’re more efficient than they appear.
It's ironic that the tour took place in the very week that Scotland delayed their Deposit Return Scheme until October 2025, aligned with the rest of the UK. All eyes were on the way that convenience stores offered returns for consumers in the Swedish system, and what we saw was … nothing. DRS in Sweden doesn’t seem to have tackled on-the-go consumption, which might account for the 85.9% return rate in the scheme, compared to their 90% target (note the scheme started in 1984, so these aren’t teething problems). My impression was of a scheme designed around large containers being returned in large volumes to large stores, very much as I’ve seen in Germany and Denmark. It would be good if UK schemes included more smaller stores where it’s operable and viable to offer this service, and the exemptions process (something which the Scotland scheme was actually making good progress on) is crucial to getting the right network of return points.
Finally, I was struck by the quality of the food offer in many of the stores. Food-to-go, bakery, meal solutions and fresh and chilled products were very impressive across different stores, and while the location of some of these stores wasn’t representative of where all UK stores trade, it did show what’s possible in small formats, with some neat design ideas making the most of the space (this is the home of IKEA, after all). We should keep challenging ourselves on our food offer in the UK convenience market; we’ve come a long way but we can do more.
Thanks very much to Sarah Johnson, Dani Nieuwenhuys, Will Nelson and Katie Noice who organised the trip, and to everyone who came and added to a great event.
