Historically seen as an upmarket supermarket for consumers in the South East and other affluent areas of the UK, there is no denying that Waitrose has made admirable strides in boosting its presence across the whole country in recent years. The retailer, owned by the John Lewis Partnership, has increased its selling space by around 50 per cent over the last three years, and is now present in the north of England and even Scotland, with recent store openings in Edinburgh.
Nielsen data reveals that Waitrose has a 4.03 per cent share of the UK grocery market, and a market growth rate of 5.5 per cent. However, the retailer enjoys a 6.1 per cent market share in fresh produce across the UK retail scene - a share that is growing all the time thanks to the buying team’s focus on top quality and wide choice.
With greater presence comes, inevitably, a larger customer base, and the retailer has ploughed significant time and effort into attracting new shoppers through its doors. For two years running now, the chain has been the proud recipient of the Re:fresh Foods from Spain Multiple Retailer of the Year accolade, and the fruit and vegetable aisles have played no small part in drumming up new consumer support.
Mary Vizoso, who has been at Waitrose for 30 years and has held the position of director of fruit and vegetable buying and food technology for the last four, explains that there is now demand across the country for the level of service and high quality that the retailer can offer. “Along with quality and choice, our customer service is key to our appeal,” she says. “Everyone who works for Waitrose is a co-owner of our business, which gives us an edge in terms of commitment.”
The produce department racks up something in the region of 189 years of combined buying experience, which according to Vizoso differentiates the team somewhat from its retail competitors. “One of our strengths is the quality of our buying team, and its passion and commitment,” she says. “The buyers know their products inside out, so can talk to growers with real understanding, which is very important. One of our expectations is that our buyers will stay with us for a good few years, to extend their product knowledge.”
The strength of the technical team is not to be underestimated either, she adds. “There is a lot of longevity in that team, and our buyers have very strong links with them. The head of that team has been here for 25 years, and there is a good mix of experience and young blood in the group.”
Jocelyn Clarke, who has been central fruit buyer for nine months, explains that there are two vital tenets to Waitrose’s produce offer. “First, we have to get the basics right, using our top-quality suppliers who we have worked with for many years - but second, we have to introduce lines offering quirkiness and a sense of difference,” she says.
The fruit team has introduced some innovative products to the shelves over the last 12 months, including new melon and berry varieties. “The Strasberry, a cross between a strawberry and a raspberry, has been a great product which has attracted a lot of attention since its recent release,” says Clarke. “We have a great grower in the Netherlands called Will Beeker, who has a lot of interesting ideas and came up with this one. We are of course still keen to explore new varieties for main pack strawberries, but quirky and unusual products like this are also very important to Waitrose.”
Another new addition to the fruit aisle has been the Extra Sweet Honeydew melon, a netted product grown in Brazil, which Clarke says is “quite exceptional”. “We went out there to visit the family growing the fruit, and were bowled over by the superb growing standards. The family are delighted with how well sales are going,” she says.
Waitrose is also increasing its volumes of Baccia melons this year, an authentic Italian melon sold with a little girdle bearing Italian writing, and made good inroads with its highly seasonal Sorrento lemon offer.
“The quality of our core range is, of course, what keeps customers coming back for more, but our consumers tend to be very interested in food, so we have got to highlight our point of difference too,” explains Clarke.
Last February, Waitrose made the switch to 100 per cent Fairtrade bananas, and sees the move as a highly positive one, despite sourcing difficulties over the last 12 months. “Moving to Fairtrade has gone exceedingly well, although it has been a very challenging year for production in the Dominican Republic and the Windward Isles because of hurricanes,” says Vizoso.
Richard Bickerton, who has been central buyer for vegetables, salads and prepared products for nine months, agrees. “The last 12 months have been very difficult across the whole produce industry because of UK and global weather patterns - the only consistency has been increased inconsistency,” he says.
Fortunately, the strength of its supplier base and its strong relationships with growers has enabled Waitrose to weather the storm of such severe climatic conditions. “We have an extremely strong, well-established supply base and very good links with growers. We have worked with some of them for 20 years or more,” says Vizoso. “We try to get out and meet the growers as much as possible, and hold lots of grower groups and conferences,and last year we launched a growers’ survey to ask their opinion on all aspects of supply to Waitrose, which we will roll out to more suppliers this year. It is very important that we get honest feedback from them, and we see this as a natural development of our grower relationships.”
In the vegetable and salad department, Bickerton explains, there are really iconic areas that the team is especially keen to showcase. “We are very proud of our tomato range, for example,” he says. “There is fantastic production in the UK, but we are trying to improve the quality of our imported varieties as well. Over the last decade, tomatoes have changed from being a product that consumers feel they should eat, into one they really want to eat. Red Choice, for example, is a good eating British tomato, offering extremely high lycopene levels.
“Herbs are also a very exciting area for us, and our market share is doing really well, at 12.5 per cent. The range has also been re-packaged. We have a great following with our vegetables and ingredients, as a lot of our customers enjoy cooking.”
As a result of its appeal to enthusiastic cooks, there are certain products in which Waitrose overtrades significantly. “We have a 16.5 per cent market share on kale, and nearly 17 per cent on legumes, both British and imported,” says Bickerton. “Other products we do very well on are pumpkins, squash and marrow, chestnut, Portobello and brown mushrooms and artichokes. Our customers expect to find lines in Waitrose that they won’t find elsewhere. In the last few weeks, we have launched pea shoots, for example.”
Prepared produce is also a growing area for Waitrose, especially fruits such as mango, pineapple and pomegranate seeds, which are packed on site in Ghana and boast extremely high sugar levels, according to Bickerton. “Prepared vegetables are also rising in popularity, thanks to the drive for healthy eating,” he says. There have been several recent new additions to the salad range, including a Thai two-rice salad, a pea and pecorino salad, and ruby coleslaw, and the retailer is now preparing to launch a new salad dressing line.
But surely the idea of a shopper buying prepared, ready-to-eat vegetables from Waitrose conflicts with the image of a budding cook ready to work from scratch with the retailer’s produce? “Customers do not fit into boxes,” says Vizoso. “Even those who like cooking may only be able to do it on a weekend. Our data suggests we have a very wide audience of shoppers.”
Waitrose’s Leckford Estate, a working farm in Hampshire wholly owned by the John Lewis Partnership, is growing an orchard of heritage apple varieties, destined for Waitrose shelves in a few years’ time. “These fruits are really like the phoenix rising from the ashes,” says Clarke. “There are some real gems of apple varieties out there, and we are fortunate to have our own extremely well-established fruit farm on which to grow them.”
The Leckford Festival, at the end of May, will see the farm’s doors thrown open to the public, and many of the supermarket’s suppliers will be on hand to talk to consumers about the importance of farming. “Leckford is a very important part of what we do,” explains Vizoso. “It produces apples, mushrooms and a lot of livestock and arable for Waitrose. I sit on the farm’s management committee, and it provides a very useful barometer for us of what is happening in the world of farming. It is a commercial farm operating on a year-round basis. The farm is treated the same as the rest of our supply base, with everything done on a partnership basis.”
Regional sourcing has formed an important part of the Waitrose game plan over the last two years, and a lot of work has been ploughed into launching nine regional product ranges linked to the regional food groups. “This has been a real challenge in some areas of the country, but the buyers have completed nine different workshops with regional suppliers, and the process is getting better,” says Bickerton. “We now have a regional fruit and veg assortment in more than 85 per cent of our stores, which was not easy to achieve, but is very important to us.”
But the supermarket is by no means favouring suppliers closer to home at the expense of those overseas. The Waitrose Foundation, a partnership empowerment project which aims to improve the lives of those working in Waitrose’s South African supply base, is about to celebrate its third birthday. All of the supermarket’s mainstream South African produce is now supplied by the foundation - citrus, which was the first crop to come under the foundation’s fold, avocados, which was the second, and now also mangoes, top fruit, stonefruit and grapes. The foundation covers 32 farms and 58 projects, and touches the lives of 20,000 farm workers and their families.
“We started the foundation to ensure we had a sustainable supply base in South Africa,” says Vizoso. “We put together a model that fitted the requirements of the country’s black economic empowerment model, and that would enable us to return a percentage of our profits to the farm workers who grow the crops. This is a very long-term commitment for us, with which we expect to give the workers improved levels of health and education, as well as enabling them to manage their own farms in the future. Since the foundation was set up, it has been hugely humbling to see the difference it has made to workers’ lives.”
Vizoso stresses that the workers’ committees are involved at ground level, and it is they who approach Waitrose with the projects they need to implement in their own communities, rather than vice versa. “The projects must come from the bottom up; it cannot be a case of us dictating what they need,” she says. “These are not big flashy projects - they are things like literacy programmes, setting up community centres, and even procuring irrigation for local football pitches.”
On one particular citrus farm, three projects are underway to give the workers a source of income even after the fruit has been picked and packed for the season. The workers can now generate a real year-round income stream for themselves, from either making beadwork to sell on the local market, making leather products for sale in the community, or sewing, making clothes and even uniforms for local businesses.
“We have also just set up a bursary at Stellenbosch University, and two students, whose parents are farm workers, have taken up the scholarships,” says Vizoso. “We have an intern joining Waitrose in July who will spend a year working with us, six months of which he will spend at the foundation in South Africa. Throughout the John Lewis Partnership, we feel passionate about the Waitrose Foundation, and our chairman and both divisional managing directors came back from a visit there inspired by the foundation team and the energy of the workers.”
While corporate social responsibility clearly forms a vital part of Waitrose’s policy, the retailer has also ensured environmental concerns remain at the top of its agenda. LEAF - Linking Environment and Farming - forms the main plank of Waitrose’s environmental policy, and 100 per cent of its UK-grown produce is now accredited to the marque. The next step is a plan to roll out the scheme across the supermarket’s overseas grower base. “LEAF is a UK charity, but we want it to go worldwide so that we have a level playing field across our supply base,” says Vizoso “This is a huge project, incorporating 50 countries and some 12,000 growers.”
Last year, Waitrose trialled the viability of rolling out LEAF accreditation to its global suppliers, and has been encouraged enough by its success to set a three-year goal for its whole supply base to become certified. “When we talked to our supply base a couple of years ago, there were concerns about the impact of implementing LEAF, but following the trials there is now a lot of enthusiasm,” says Vizoso. “Worries about cost have evaporated, because the growers who are already accredited have found efficiencies from LEAF, for example with their input costs going down.”
Waitrose is also lending its support to LEAF’s Open Farm Sunday on June 1, a day when 500-600 farms across the UK throw their doors open to the public to find out how their food is produced.
Still on the environmental theme, the retailer has not been remiss in setting itself stringent packaging reduction measures. Bickerton says: “There is a consistent drive to reduce packaging across every sector. In produce, that means we have started stocking things like more loose caulis, instead of in a bag, putting stir fries into bags where possible, rather than thick trays, etc. It is important for us to maintain the dynamic of protecting products, but reduce the amount of packaging we use.”
So with a strong performance notched up over the last few years, and no signs of growth slowing down, where does Waitrose go from here? “I think it is a matter of remaining focused on sourcing the best quality and innovation,” says Vizoso. “We have to have an attitude of restless dissatisfaction, and we can always improve.”
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