Does your store carry products that fit well with your unique customer base? Developing and maintaining a custom assortment strategy has never been more important in today’s fast-changing and competitive environment. It can help attract new shoppers to your store, retain existing shoppers and ultimately make your store more profitable and successful. It’s absolutely critical to maintaining market share and a competitive edge. Yet truly understanding your customers and providing the best possible product assortment fit on your own takes significant time, expertise, effort and expense.
That’s why at UNFI Professional Services, we offer Assortment Optimization services. By tapping into a wide variety of data sources and technology solutions, we provide independent retailers with access to valuable intel, market trend insights and strategic assortment recommendations. Features of our program:
- Detailed and brand-agnostic assortment and data analysis at a store, brand, category, and/or item level. You’ll know which items to add and which to scale back or eliminate.
- Support of Grocery, Dairy, Frozen, and Meat departments. We can help you make sure your store has the right product assortment in critical areas.
- Assortment recommendations addressing market voids, item deletes, local market relevance and key retailer initiatives. We’ll analyze multiple data points.
- Comprehensive list of data sources, including market, demographics, trade areas (Nielsen); specialty/organic market & trends (SPINS); UNFI Warehouse and Planogram data and Retailer POS data. Our data sources are second to none.
- Compatibility with Custom Schematics program to facilitate faster execution of product strategy. We can help you every step of the way to a more effective product assortment and faster execution of product strategy.
Key Assortment Optimization deliverables:
- Excel format Ranking Report
- Indicate product availability in retailer’s assigned DC
- Proprietary calculations rank Items & Performance
- Retailer-specific product recommendations
- Nielsen & SPINS data points (requires sharing agreements)
Shopper surveys from McKinsey underscore the importance of regularly revisiting your store’s product assortment. For example, as fatigue sets in around cooking and baking at home, consumers are demanding more fresh, ready-to-eat and oven-ready products instead of ingredients used to cook and bake from scratch. Shoppers in a wide range of demographics are in large numbers seeking out natural/organic/functional/immunity-boosting products. More shoppers nationwide are making fewer food shopping trips and shopping at fewer stores, so it’s critical that your store has what they’re looking for. It’s time to make sure that your store’s product assortment delivers value and convenience to your customers.
Let’s talk about a more customized and effective approach to product assortment! E-mail us at [email protected].
