Opinion: Al Overton
Al Overton from Wonderland Ventures discusses why chocolate is a retailer’s golden ticket for capturing customers year-round.
It has been quite an interesting few years for chocolate. The part that we never see as customers is the failing cocoa industry in West Africa, with three successive poor harvests pushing up global prices. A tonne of cocoa beans that cost £3,000 in 2023 peaked at £12,000 last February and is still around £8,000. Meanwhile my local corner shop is selling bars of Dubai chocolate for £12, which has doubled the global price of pistachio nuts.
Meanwhile, many cocoa farmers still earn less than a dollar a day, and Tony’s has been able to build a transparent sourcing network that is strong enough to make other brands advertise to their customers that they are using Tony’s supply chain, and to put every other big chocolate brand on the back foot.
Meanwhile, our perceptions of chocolate have been slowly shifting, from seeing it as an indulgent, unhealthy luxury to seeing the sugar in chocolate as evil but the chocolate itself as a life-enhancing, mood boosting, antioxidant-laden superfood. This in turn is driving interest in higher percent cacao bars and good quality chocolate as health food, not guilt food.
And meanwhile, with the exception of the £12 Dubai chocolate and Tony’s being a big feature on most store shelves, the chocolate range in any supermarket has not really changed since I was a kid. Like Hollywood movies, they seem to just keep churning out new copies of the same old things.
All of which gives you an opportunity.
“Offer them a killer chocolate selection and you will certainly get more of their time.”
Your customers love chocolate. It is a category where they want to be making good choices, where they are open to trying new flavours and new brands and where they are happy to spend time browsing through an unfamiliar range. For an independent retailer, chocolate is a dream – try getting your customers engaged in browsing your household cleaning range, or trying an unfamiliar brand of cola. No chance. But they will love to get involved with your chocolate range.
Back when I was a retailer, I looked at all the same numbers and KPIs as everyone else, simply because that was all I had – number of transactions, average basket value, product sales. But what I really wanted to know was how many customers I had, how often they came in and how much time they spent in my store. These days with anything we want available whenever we want it, how we spend time is our key investment rather than where we spend money.
What has that got to do with anything? Well, imagine you could track the speed at which customers walk around your store, where they dwell and where they speed up. No one lingers in front of that household cleaning section, but they probably do slow down as they are walking past the chocolate bay. Offer them a killer chocolate selection and you will certainly get more of their time. More of their money will follow. And what makes a killer selection? Something new, something different, something with story. And everything needs to be delicious.
Choosing what to stock in chocolate is the same as for any other category:
What does your shop stand for? What are your product standards? Does this mean only organic chocolate, or Fairtrade?
What solutions do you want to solve for customers? A range of higher percentage chocolates for the sugar avoiders? A strong range of vegan chocolate? Healthier kids’ snacks? Single origin stories for the globally aware?
How do you balance familiarity with speciality? Do you want to stock the same slavery-free brand as Asda, but at 30p higher retail?
Choose your heroes – what is your champion chocolate? Put that front and centre.
And finally, don’t forget that food is first and foremost about taste, and that chocolate and ice cream are the extreme examples of this. Don’t offer your customers anything that does not deliver on taste.
By Al Overton, Wonderland Ventures