Invitation to Participate in New Research

As our research has highlighted (click here) the "marking down" of food close to its expiry date can help accelerate sales and avoid the added costs of charity donations, animal feed and landfill.

In the last five years, there has been significant progress by retailers on discounting strategies, with many retailers moving away from static to dynamic discounts. Further advances have been made to improve productivity through the use of ledger based systems that help reduce the number of inspections by 85% in one of the recent case studies presented by a retailer.

However, there has been relatively little research on the placement of the items that are being marked down with the often yellow stickers. Where is it best to place these yellow stickered products?

Do you place the markdowns in the aisle alongside full priced products, or keep them in the same aisle / bays as the full price products but place on the bottom shelf or alternatively, like in the picture, move them to a special dedicated location within or at the end of the aisle.

And if so, for what reasons are you making these choices? To maximise the markdown sell through rate? to manage the cost of labour? or grow the profit margin, by reducing the impact on the sales of full price substitutes? Or is there a marketing and brand reputation reason that the business is looking to achieve via the placement strategy?

A new research study has been commissioned and is being by Professor Sarah Martins and she will present the research study to the food waste working group and with a request to retailers for help with the research and data on the impact of these different placement options. The presentation and discussion is planned for March 20th and f you would like to join that meeting, please click here to register.

In the meantime, we need your help in completing a simple one question survey that asks you please share where you currently display markdowns / yellow stickered products in your stores.

It should take less than two minutes, to complete and it is best taken on a personal device Vs laptop. The link is below. Thank you very much for your help.