BACKGROUND
Premier Foods is one of the UK’s leading food manufacturers. They supply a range of retail, wholesale, food service and other customers with some of Britain’s best loved brands, including Ambrosia desserts, Batchelors convenient meals, Bisto gravy, Loyd Grossman sauces, Mr. Kipling cakes, OXO stocks and Sharwood’s Asian foods.
CHALLENGES
The UK has seen significant disruption fuelled by the growth in online retailing, convenience outlets as well as new competition from discounters. Shoppers have become more demanding and, at the same time, savvy. They want the best selection at the right price.
One response to this change has been for retailers to cut SKUs, often without supplier consultation. The category management team at Premier Foods found they were becoming less involved in retailer assortment changes. Premier Foods needed a solution that would enable greater collaboration between their retailer partners and that could easily visualize assortment range changes.
BENEFITS
Premier Foods turned to Symphony RetailAI, and deployed SR Virtual Store Design as part of their own compact merchandising lab. The virtual reality solution has helped Premier Foods to:
- Streamline planning processes as well as eliminate execution issues often tied to paper-planning processes of the past
- Establish their business as an extension of its retailers’ category planning capabilities, by delivering profitable category growth initiatives that can be executed efficiently in-store
- Forming better relationships with retailer partners, as the virtual reality enabled merchandising facility gives them a competitive edge over other CPGs
Want to learn more about Premier Foods’ success?
Read the guest blog by Jeremy Peters: Virtual reality innovation by Premier Foods supports retail collaboration