At Woodlands, we’re always looking for developing new categories that can help us bring customers to the store and drive up spend in areas where we previously didn’t trade. The sudden growth of the overall ‘free-from’ category in the UK is one area that we have been looking at for some time and have introduced a few lines on a more or less random basis over the last six months. We were keen, however, to take a more organised approach to developing free-from sales – and where better to start than with Quorn, the UK’s leading meat-free brand.
Quorn is well established in supermarkets but is starting to make some serious in-roads into local retailing, and that growth will certainly be accelerated in Scotland thanks to the recent appointment of former Burton’s duo David Grant and Gary Routledge, a pair well known to the Scottish trade.
While we are only a few weeks into the trial of five Quorn SKUs, the unit sales numbers are already looking encouraging:
- Quorn Sausages – 18 (£1.99 RSP)
- Quorn Cottage Pie – 12 (£2.29 RSP)
- Quorn Deli Ham – 9 (£1.50 RSP)
- Quorn Lasagne – 8 (£2.49 RSP)
- Quorn Nuggets – 15 (£2.29 RSP)
The IRI statistics speak for themselves: meat-free products are now bought by around 9.5 million people and almost three quarters of those are non-vegetarians. Meat-free shoppers also spend four times as much in-store as non-meat free shoppers, according to Kantar, making a massive difference to the basket spend.
Healthier, meat-free eating has become a lifestyle choice for many customers, and Quorn is the number one beneficiary of that growth.
- The meat-free category is now worth over £270m
- 73% of meat-free product purchasers are non-vegetarian
- Almost 9.5 million people buy into the category
- The Quorn brand accounts for more than half of all meat-free sales
- Quorn annual sales values top £161m and the brand is growing at 13%
The brand is growing at 13% a year, so it was the perfect choice for our first serious foray into free-from and meat-free. We decided to take the top five selling SKUs into Woodlands, a mix of chilled and frozen: Quorn Sausages, Quorn Cottage Pie, Quorn Deli Ham, Quorn Lasagne, and Quorn Nuggets.
The trial is still very new but initial signs are very encouraging – we’ve sold 62 units in a few weeks – even if we initially had our reservations about how well meat-free lines would go down in our part of Falkirk. In fact, we sold our first pack of Quorn Sausages within 20 minutes of putting them on the shelf for the first time!
- The meat-free frozen sausage sub-category is growing at 17%
- Frozen meat-free burgers are also growing at 27%
- Quorn’s Southern Style burger is worth £2m within the frozen category
- Quorn’s biggest sausage SKU is worth £4.9m
Julian Cooke, Head of UK Category Management at Quorn, told us: “Shoppers are more health conscious and discerning than ever before. That’s why meat free category is now valued at over £270m and is bought by almost nine and a half million shoppers, 73% of whom are non-vegetarians, and they are looking for great-tasting, nutritionally healthy, sustainable products such as Quorn.”
We chose Quorn as a bit of a beacon brand for the store because it’s the best-known name and lets our customers know that we have meat-free, healthier options available. We have already had some unexpected success with the Alpro brand range of soya and rice milks which we bought by accident once and then quickly sold out, alerting us to an opportunity we hadn’t been aware of before!
