Waitrose has shrunk its range by 5% in the past year alone, exclusive data for The Grocer has shown.
The upscale supermarket has made cuts to nearly every single category between the end of November 2021 and end of November 2022, according to Assosia data.
On 28 November this year, its full range featured 16,004 SKUs – down from 16,826 on the same date the year before.
The categories that took the biggest hits included food cupboard (–10.8%), drinks (–10.8%), frozen food (–10.2%) and baby (–8.3%).
Fresh food, healthy and beauty, BWS and household also shrank, albeit by much smaller rates.
Commercial director Charlotte Di Cello recently told The Grocer the supermarket was aware it could not have a range “as big as Tesco’s”.
“We’ve got to optimise and identify the ranges we want to have as authoritative ranges – for instance herbs and spices, we have taken the brands out.”
Earlier this year, Waitrose overhauled its herbs & spices offering when it revamped the Cooks’ Ingredients range as it wanted to offer customers a wider choice of cooking essentials off the back of a rise in home cooking trends.
“It’s an authority area, we should absolutely own that,” Di Cello said.
“But there are other parts of the shop that might be less important for us because we can’t have a huge range everywhere. It can’t be as big as Tesco’s.”
Di Cello also confirmed Waitrose would be looking at further cutting lines across household, such as in laundry.
“We will be optimising all of the proposition,” she said. “We need to optimise our SKUs so that we’ve got some clear line of sight as to making sure that we haven’t got light lines that our customers don’t particularly want, but absolutely not taking away from the more unique SKUs and the areas that matter to customers.”
On the other hand, areas like petcare and bakery have seen range increases (1.3% and 9.5%, respectively).
Waitrose recently joined forces with posh bakery chain Gail’s in a bid to extend its in-store range, which Di Cello said was popular among its middle-class customers.
“We’ve been very choiceful about these parts of the proposition.”
No comments yet