Special report: Sainsbury's, Seafood Retailer of the Year 2005 – Catch of the year

The seafood team at Sainsbury's celebrated its award for Seafood Retailer of the Year 2005 with the customary back-slapping and Champagne, but chose a far more inventive choice of nibbles than the crisps and nuts you'd expect at such an occasion. These included fishy innovations from the retailer's new Christmas range, such as chestnut and cinnamon smoked salmon and spicy kiln-baked fish bites on cocktail sticks, products that illustrate well why the retailer picked up the category trophy for the second successive year at the Retail Industry Awards.

In the year following its first award, Sainsbury's has continued to push back boundaries for supermarket retail of seafood, championing the category with promotional activity -- liaising with The Seafish Industry Authority and also making fish a central part of the Try Something New campaign -- designed simultaneously to bring in new consumers and excite existing buyers. In the last 12 months the supermarket's business has grown by 15%, compared to the market average of 10%.

According to fish and poultry category manager Melanie Sachdeva, there are a number of key reasons why Sainsbury's has been able to put so much clear blue water between it and many of its competitors, but its progress in prepacked product, which will all feature the Retail Industry Award logo once again this year, stands out. "Prepacked is a key strength for us," she says, "and we have a wider range than the competition across shellfish, raw fish and ready-to-eat fish. We are driving innovation in pre-packed and give a lot of space to it."

Once product is on shelf, the seafood team has helped shift it in volume by making sure all stores are on board with well-executed promotional activity -- and give it prime location wherever they can. "When we promote salmon or shellfish we tend to locate it at the front of store so as the customer shops fresh produce there is a gondola end which almost always has salmon or shellfish on it," says Sachdeva "A combination of good planning, excellent supplier relationships -- to get additional volumes at key times, for instance -- and making sure we are ahead of the market in terms of pricing and quality are all important."

Media advertising has stimulated the category at important trial occasions like Christmas, where last year the retailer had Jamie Oliver out on a Scottish loch to promote its birch and juniper smoked salmon, which Sachdeva calls the fish category's "biggest success story so far".

The thrust of all Sainsbury's activity is aimed at increasing consumption, easing the way for the many consumers who consider fish a daunting category they want to shop but which they are unsure of how to explore. "One of our main challenges is to inspire consumers to trial," says Sachdeva. "I believe the only way they can have confidence to try new species and to cook them is by actually sampling them."

Sainsbury's ran its biggest-ever sampling campaign for the category in store car parks last year, where shoppers were encouraged to consider a switch from farmed salmon to the wild Alaskan variety and also offered tuna, for which sales have doubled during the last year. "People are travelling more and trying new species like tuna and red snapper," says Sachdeva. "A product like tuna is a good alternative to meat, more filling than white fish, healthy and rich in omega 3," says Sachdeva. "We want to demonstrate how easy it is to get these products into really inspiring but everyday recipe ideas. Sampling is key to getting people to trade up into new areas, and we back this up with things like recipe cards."

However, these initiatives would be much less powerful if Sainsbury's failed to match them with a stream of npd to add excitement to the category. The supermarket boasts many first-to-market products, including the aforementioned, intensely flavoured double cured chestnut and cinnamon smoked salmon, one of 30 different products that have given Sainsbury's a market-leading share in smoked salmon, and buns and butteries with salmon and cream cheese for those Christmas brunches.

"We have the most comprehensive and contemporary range out there," says Sachdeva. "We have implemented new lines such as South African hake, which is approved by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and has done very well for us."

As consumer knowledge of different fish species grows, so too will awareness of issues such as overfishing and sustainability in the category, particular in the area of exotic fish, which has great potential to grow. Sainsbury's has taken this on board by seeking industry approval of product and even removing lines such as the fantastically named Patagonian tooth fish (also known as ice fish) from its shelves when doubts were raised about its sustainability, in spite of customer requests and the fact it was selling well.

The team is making a number of sustainability recommendations to the Sainsbury's board for approval and has also raised the question of whether selling cod and haddock year-round is the best for customers. Although this proposal is couched in freshness rather than sustainability terms, if passed it means the supermarket will increasingly be encouraging consumers to eat different fish at key times of the year. It recently launched Catch Today -- Season's Best, an initiative that dovetails with Try Something New and flags up a monthly product, such as sprats, to shoppers.

Sainsbury's has also ticked boxes when it comes to sourcing the freshest fish possible for customers and has partnered with Interfish in the south west to get direct deliveries into 12 stores such as Newquay, Marsh Mills and Paignton. "Customers love the idea of having fish coming straight off the boat and into stores, so there is definitely scope to expand this initiative further," says Sachdeva.

Making seafood more accessible to modern shoppers has taken the above process to another level and the retailer has embarked on a specific initiative not only to introduce different products, but also to make them more convenient. While 90-95% of Sainsbury's 460-strong store portfolio has serve-over fish counters, in Local and Central stores there has been a greater focus on smaller portions and easy-and-ready-to-eat lines. "We believe there is a big market for convenience and snacking within seafood and we want to develop both a range of snacking products and products that target the single serving population, so we'd have a single pack of salmon instead of four fillets, for example," says Sachdeva. "There is a big growth area in lunchbox and snacking solutions and we want to target our convenience stores a lot more heavily than we are now."

The seafood team hopes to launch a dedicated convenience range within the next year, as well as developing its snacking range. "We're still in organic growth with this, but we have highlighted further opportunities," says Sachdeva. "Sainsbury's has already performed well in the ready-to-eat market and there is more mileage to do even better than that. It's not just product innovation we're looking at, it's packaging innovation as well. If you look at some of the packaging innovations in cheese, and biscuits, and so on, they are far further ahead than we are."

Sainsbury's says training has reinforced activity across all stores, and has included the recent launch of its 'fish Bible', its information guide for staff, which goes into every store and contains information about all species and complementary products from other categories such as wine, fitting in well with the Try Something New approach throughout the store. "We want our colleagues to inspire consumers to try different ways of cooking, and this guide helps them talk confidently about the product," says Sachdeva.

Sainsbury's continued focus on seafood is certainly no accident, says Sachdeva. "It fits into all the company's corporate values," she says. "Sainsbury's is striving to be healthy, safe, tasty and fish fits all of these. We think there is headroom for us to own this category, to do something quite different in terms of quality, taste and innovation. And we want to continue to grow in double-digit terms for at least the next three years."

If it achieves these targets, seafood will have an important role to play in Justin King's revival plan for Sainsbury's. "I think we've contributed really well to Making Sainsbury's Great Again," says Sachdeva, "and we're on a journey to make it even better." Words that may well lead to the charging of more Champagne glasses -- and the fetching of interesting nibbles in years to come.