What's Hot & What's Not, feat. Unicorn Grocery
Kellie Bubble from Unicorn Grocery in Manchester runs through the most and least popular SKUs in-store, from basic staples to baby toiletries.
What’s Hot: The basics
Unicorn is an ingredients shop and we’re proud to flood our community with affordable, decent food, much of it organic. Customers come for weekly shops as well as top-ups. Basic ingredients are always popular but jumped 26% in Q1 compared to the same period last year. Driving sales are tinned chickpeas and tomatoes, baked beans, porridge oats, hummus and fresh bread. Our range of unpackaged organic fruit and veg is the heart and soul of Unicorn. We’ve built close relationships with growers, including crop-planning together, and sell a wide range of staples and heritage varieties. In Q1 £736K of our fresh produce was sold; that’s volume sales up 14%! Generating a consistent, reliable market for affordable organic produce is central to us. Unsurprisingly, top sellers are carrots, spuds and apples – all UK. We’re not sure if kombucha is ‘a basic’ but the wonderful world of grocery is a moving beast and the rocketing sales of Suma booch are telling the story that it’s in many a shopping basket. Let’s big it up for our fellow worker co-operative Suma for making brilliant products!
What’s Hot: Deli soup
We’ve always prided ourselves on having no food waste. Our ‘free produce’ box, two-way compost stream and fast turnover of fresh produce have largely taken care of this, but our in-house kitchen, staffed by our talented cooks, works beautifully to meet this end, providing a range of ‘ready to heat and eat at home’ wholesome meals. We have a daily self-serve hot soup and a few options tubbed up in the chiller. Keeping up with demand is the challenge; they fly off the shelves, out of the soup urn and into happy bellies. The in-house hot soup is a massive draw with the biggest YOY increase of 22%.
What’s Hot: Unpacked
We pack down a massive range of commodities – flakes, grains, pulses, herbs, nuts, dried fruits. Buying in bulk and packing down on-site means we can pass on competitive prices to customers. In 2019 we introduced bulk hoppers in a move towards reducing packaging. Enthusiasm for this has taken time to translate into sales as customers' habits take a while to change; however, this year we’re seeing a reassuring uplift with more ‘unpacked’ lines making their way through the tills. Sales have more than doubled, with flakes and grains showing a threefold increase and nuts not far behind.
What’s Not: Juice
Our juice section has slowed over recent years as kombucha and bottled water sales have grown. As a business that has imported direct from Europe for 28 years we have experienced some Brexit casualties in our offer, and the long-loved Delizum juices were the last to go as a result of the new labelling laws. Our range was looking a little threadbare! We are hoping the introduction of a new range, including quite a few lines from James White, will revitalize this section in the coming months.
What’s Not: Cereal
We have a range of branded box cereals that are very slow compared to the cereals we mix and pack ourselves. They struggle to offer the same value but they have a small following so they are good to have in the mix. We have recently introduced some satisfyingly crunchy organic wholegrain rice pops from IBIS Rice that we think fill a breakfast shaped gap and boost the boxed cereals a little.
What’s Not: Baby care
We have fairly strict buying guidelines which means all our toiletries are at the natural end of the spectrum and while we have a small section of baby toiletries they are slow sellers. It's quite likely that customers buy the better value and equally natural and gentle products that are suitable everyday for everybody, instead of buying the range that is targeted towards new parents – or maybe it’s time we reviewed and refreshed the range? It could be that we are not offering a range that meets the desires of the consumer. It’s always worth taking a step back to have a look at a category with fresh eyes!
By Kellie Bubble, Unicorn Grocery