Profile: Greg Brindle, Brindle Group chairman
Greg Brindle runs a portfolio of smaller boutique retail stores in the Perth metro area and is constantly looking for ways to compete against the big retail giants.
His portfolio includes IGA stores in Wembley, Leederville, Canning Bridge and Shenton Park, The Good Grocer in Applecross, Rottnest General Store, Rottnest Geordie Bay Store and Rottnest Bakery.
To find a point of difference and distinguish his stores from the rest he launched a private label, premium product range called The Good Grocer Collection 12 months ago.
The concept was to find unique Western Australian food products that were fresh and of high quality, that couldn’t find their own distribution and re-label them under a clean, established brand aimed at the upper end of the market.
“A lot of small, cottage industry-style producers were struggling to find a market,” he said. “What we can do for, say the little cheese producer down in Denmark who doesn’t have the resources, is help with packaging, labelling and distribution. We can help take a quantity from them and give them an immediate presence in eight supermarkets. Otherwise that cheese producer has to hop in a car with an esky and go from one supermarket to the next selling very small quantities and, regrettably, that is where a lot of these small producers are at.
“Collectively as a group our offer and style is all about fresh, high quality and premium products. We already had some value in our Good Grocer store, which is a top end premium supermarket in Applecross, so we used that branding for this premium product range.
“The motivation for creating the premium, boutique private label as just another way of differentiating from our bigger competitors. It was to give our customers a point of difference.”
Greg said determining what to include in the collection was a process of analysing the products available and looking at where they could value add at the top end in a category range.
“We will look for categories where we think we can add some value by providing a better quality product at a value price. There are plenty of great cheeses around, but which producer is doing something special but finding it hard to get distribution, that is where we can work together with them.
“So there were two motivations for bringing in this range, to complement and value add to a category of products and provide our customers with a sense of uniqueness, that you can only buy this particular product in one of our eight stores.
“We also have a set of guidelines that a product has to meet before we take it on, it has to have a sense of uniqueness, it has to represent value and it has to be of high quality.
“We have found that we can now talk to our suppliers and there are some opportunities for them to custom build a product for us that is unique to The Good Grocer Collection, which is another way to differentiate from the others.”
So 12 months in, have there been any barriers to creating this collection?
“When you are dealing in that fresh area it has a short life so you have to be careful with shrinkage and use-by dates, that can be a challenge for the producer and retail store,” Greg said.
“That is always going to be a challenge because you need to have a strong discipline around process and we think we are getting better at it.”
Another area they plan on addressing was to better convey the background story of the producer.
“There are some great stories with these smaller producers and while we try to get a bit of that out on the packaging, we don’t want to clutter it with too many words, so it is predominantly done internally with an aggressive tasting program,” he said.
“The producers can come into the store, hand sell and talk up their product or we employ tasters to give the background story on these producers. We haven’t developed an advertising platform yet for the collection so that is something we will work towards and do a better job at spreading the word.”
The release of The Good Grocer Collection has been more successful than Greg had anticipated and he plans expanding it in the years to come.
“The consumer understands the range, they are talking about it and enjoying it and our repeat sales are strong. We set a budget for the first 12 months in terms of sales and we got there in eight months,” he said.
“We have around 50 different varieties of products across 15 categories and I would hope to be moving that to 50 or 60 categories in the next 12 months. I can see us having around 300 products over the next two to three years and that won’t be just refrigerated items, that will be shelf items as well.”
Food Industry Innovation Manger Kim Antonio is happy with the level of interest and enthusiasm the project is receiving from industry.
“It is great that companies like the Brindle Group reached out to make contact with the Food Industry Innovation team at the commencement of the project.
“It’s been highly beneficial meeting with brand and product development manager Francesco Taranto and group buyer Gary Lay to discuss some of the wonderful premium Western Australian products we work with and share opportunities for collaboration.”
For more information on how your business can connect with the project, contact Kim Antonio, Food Industry Innovation Project Manager.
Phone: +61 (0) 8 9368 3676 or email kim.antonio@agric.wa.gov.au