S1 Ep 7:
Meat losses, especially on lines such as Fillet Steaks, can be in excess of 20% of sales but what is driving these losses?
Theft for Resale? Internal Theft & Collusion? Variable Weight Pricing? Theft in Transit? Non Scanning at the SCO? etc.
And more importantly, how do you prevent these losses without hurting sales and customer satisfaction?
On this episode, Colin Peacock is joined by Professor Adrian Beck to discuss how retailers and supermarkets are trying to address this issue - from more frequent re-stocks, through to tagging or store design.
Podcast summary
Fresh meat losses in grocery retail have become a pressing issue, with some retailers reporting dramatic increases and fresh meat accounting for a significant share of total store losses.
Colin Peacock and Professor Adrian Beck discuss what retailers are seeing in the fresh meat category, including both malicious and non-malicious causes, and how peers are benchmarking the scale of the problem.
They explore how retailers are adding protective “friction” back into stores through target hardening, while also testing operational changes like limiting shelf availability and adjusting ranging and location.
The conversation also highlights the practical tensions between EAS tagging and self-checkout or scan-and-go, and the need for solutions that work smoothly in modern checkout environments.
Cleaned transcript
Why fresh meat losses are rising on retailer agendas
COLIN:
Hello and welcome to the ECR Retail Loss Sell More and Lose Less podcast series. My name is Colin Peacock.
I work with a community of experts and academics who are keen to share their latest research findings and best practices.
Every week or two in this series I’ll be joined by one of those experts and academics to discuss some of the very latest insights from our meetings and discussions and research on best practices.
In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Professor Beck and we look at the problem of losses on the fresh meat category.
This has seen a substantial increase in losses over the last couple of years and we’re exploring the different ways that retailers are tackling this problem.
Last week we had a couple of sessions, but one of them was on protein or fresh meat.
It was around the sort of losses. It was suggested as a session by one of our Australian friends and it got enormous interest, actually.
We had a lot of retailers on the call and we don’t normally do these sort of deep dives onto a product, especially when the nature of the losses might be more malicious than non-malicious.
Nevertheless, we had a great discussion. I think 10 or so retailers shared updates on what they’re doing.
So a really good sharing session, both in terms of numbers that they were recording, which helped with benchmarking, but also the practices that they were looking at now and in the future.
So with all that said, what did you write down in that sort of scholarly book of notes around shrinkage meetings that you’ve got there?
ADRIAN:
Yes, it was a good session, I thought, because one of the things that was interesting was just the volume of retailers who wanted to share about this.
It’s clearly a pressing concern for a lot of grocers, I think.
In the past, I don’t think we’ve really considered meat to be a hot product.
We’ve traditionally focused upon beers, wines and spirits, perhaps, or health and beauty, classics, nappies and so on.
And meat hasn’t often come to the top of the list.
So it was really interesting to, first of all, hear just about some of the numbers that retailers were prepared to share on how much they were losing.
Some of them were really quite dramatic, sort of not quite double digit, but getting close to double digit.
And accounting for perhaps as much as a third of all their losses in their store. It’s incredible.
COLIN:
Sign of the times, perhaps. But, yeah, very interesting level.
Benchmarking the scale of fresh meat losses
ADRIAN:
So that was an interesting part, just getting a sense of the scale of this.
The thing that struck me was that all the retailers who participated, the amount of energy that they’re putting in to try and protect these products now.
There’s clearly a lot of work been going on, and most of it was very much traditional target hardening approaches.
We’ve gone through this phase where stores have been opened up and we’ve been trying to reduce the amount of friction.
And of course, self-checkout has been part of that because self-checkout needs to be as little friction as you possibly can, because you’re expecting the customer to do all the work.
What we saw here was lots of retailers putting layers of friction back in to try and protect these products.
Reducing fresh meat losses with target hardening and shelf strategies
ADRIAN:
Lots of tagging strategies, people talking about using safer cases on meat, which traditionally we haven’t really seen.
So there was lots of effort being put in to try and protect them.
I also liked some of the other things that people talked about, taking a slightly more progressive approach around thinking about the ranging of these in certain stores.
Do we want these products in all our stores?
Trying to limit the amount of stock on shelf availability, so little and often, to try and limit the damage that might be coming through that.
It was also interesting to hear about trying to understand some of the non-theft related issues associated with meat around weight, and how the system manages a product that can vary a lot in weight.
How you can make sure that you’re not corrupting your shrink data simply because of process issues.
So it was really interesting listening to these retailers putting a lot of energy into trying to protect what is clearly a vulnerable brand for some of them.
COLIN:
Picking up on that, I think one of the other things we heard was about location and the benefit of moving to a more high traffic, high visibility location in the store.
That was working well for one retailer.
It seems obvious, but you can’t put everything in front of the store.
Certainly putting the items that are causing such enormous levels of loss into a more visible location seems to be working and seems to make sense.
But we did hear a bit of a conundrum around the EAS and the soft tagging, around retailers who’ve got a lot of mobile scan and go operations.
Some of the retailers in the room would have had 15 or 12 percent or something of their total transactions going through a handheld device.
And that seemed to be quite a problem. I’m not sure how you can square that circle.
What were your thoughts on that?
EAS tagging and self-checkout: the friction problem behind fresh meat losses
ADRIAN:
We’ve spoken about this before. One of the great challenges with tagging technologies is that it doesn’t sit well with self-checkout.
Somehow you want the tag to be deactivated as easy as you can, but you don’t want to make that deactivation too easy because it’s losing its purpose in terms of protecting the product.
We’ve seen lots of retailers struggling to try and find ways to make sure that tags are deactivated properly, so you don’t get lots of tag pollution leaving the stores, or setting the alarms off, and all the problems we’ve seen with that.
It becomes particularly acute when you’re using hard tags as well, or safer cases, where really the only way is you’ve either got to get a member of staff involved to get that defensive product off it, or you’ve got to allow the consumer to do that.
That’s quite tricky technology because when you start letting customers take these things apart, you suddenly think, oh, my goodness, is anybody going to get hurt around this, or health and safety issues?
We heard a lot of retailers who were bringing in tagging because they were concerned about the numbers, but they were seeing a real jarring with their self-checkout systems and how they’re going to try and make those work.
For some of them, it didn’t feel good. The idea that you’re going to have to wait till the consumer sets the alarm off to get a member of staff to come and deactivate the tag didn’t feel right.
It comes back also to the conversation we had around mobile scanning go where they were accounting for less than one percent of transactions.
Do you want this system in there? Because it compromises your systems in lots of other ways.
You’re suddenly having to say, do we have to take tags off to make mobile scan work?
And you go, well, nobody’s really using mobile scan. So do we really want to do that?
So there’s lots of issues around this.
I think people were talking a lot about tagging because it is one of the most traditional and established ways to try.
But it is one of the conundrums with self-checkout: we need the manufacturers and developers of tagging systems to really begin to think through how their product properly interacts with self-checkout.
How can they be SCO compliant, as it were, with their product to make sure that retailers aren’t struggling with this, with having to choose between self-checkout and tagging?
How can we begin to bring them together?
I know some suppliers are certainly thinking this through now and developing new products to enable this to happen.
Revisiting interventions and progress on fresh meat losses
COLIN:
We shall see that.
I spoke to a few of the retailers afterwards. They wanted an anniversary in this meeting.
So I think we’ll see where we got to this time next year.
See whether these issues and these new suppliers of EAS come through, see what progress has been made with some of the other retailers and some of the interventions, and some of the tracking through the supply chain that some people mentioned.
So it should be really interesting.
But thank you so much for sharing your notes. We shall revisit this in a year’s time. Thank you again.
Bye-bye.
ADRIAN:
Cheers Colin. Bye-bye.
