Growing distribution within the grocery multiples
Objective
Based in Northern Ireland, Thompson’s supply many of the leading multiple retailers with Tea.
Outside of Northern Ireland, the team wanted to build upon their recent success in Scotland by understanding the market, key brands along with their own category performance.
In addition to this, the team were looking at wider distribution opportunities to grow the brand across more Scottish stores and identify opportunities to win national listings across the UK.
Approach
Without a dedicated in-house Insight resource, the team at Thompspn’s asked TRKR to:
source the right market data
help the team utilise this data source to create a concise and commercially-led trade story for retail buyers
With over 20 years experience of working with both consumer panel and EPOS data, the TRKR team liaised with the leading market data providers and sourced EPOS data sources from NIQ to develop a story for Thompson’s key retail customers and to highlight opportunities to grow the Black Tea category.
With the resulting TRKR report, the Thompson’s team were able to understand:
Size and performance of Tea
Key sector performance including trends in pack size
Top product SKUs in Scotland and the Rest of the UK
Thompson’s presence within the category - how their product range was performing versus key rivals
Opportunities to extend distribution for elements of their product range by retailer
The size of the prize for Thompson’s and their retail customers
Outcomes
Thompson’s have used the output from this work to:
Gain additional listings with Morrisons from mid-July 2024
Create discussions with Sainsbury’s about further listings in Scotland and Nationally
Gained additional listing in Tesco in Scotland along with the opportunity to win a National listing
Used the market data to open up wider conversations with retailers
“Working with the team at TRKR has been invaluable. The way in which TRKR brought the data to life made it easy to understand and present to retail buyers. The impact of this is that we’ve already had additional listings confirmed and we’ve created further opportunities in the year ahead.
A really worthwhile exercise and we can now utilise this output for the next 12 months.”
Jonathan McWhinney, Commercial Manager, Thompson’s