Ben Mckechnie, Epicurium: “Speciality retailers are innovative by nature”

We’ve always been seen as a retail wholesaler, and have seen ourselves as such. While a lot of the Covid talk was about the closure of foodservice, the closure of city centres and business districts has had far wider reaching impact than has been typically reported. We hadn’t appreciated quite how exposed we would be to what’s effectively ‘retail foodservice’ – those tuckshop retailers, travel hubs and stores serving commuters and office workers with things to eat on their way to work, at lunchtime, etc.

The reports of convenience retail having double digit/record growth during the pandemic belies the major disruption caused to retailers in these locations. Conversely, forecourt retail has been doing very well with many forecourts in small towns and rural areas offering a vital lifeline to their local communities. A lot of forecourts upped their game considerably to take up this mantle.

In the speciality sector, retailers were impressively quick to adapt and have seen some great gains of course. With people locked down and finding themselves with an unexpected boost to disposable income, the comforts offered by exciting artisan foods were very welcome. I think people had the time to understand and appreciate the massive difference in quality and taste… and satisfaction… that taking the time to find and try some of the fantastic speciality food we have offers.

With a lot of speciality retailers being highly innovative by nature, they typically have been well suited to the surge in online ordering and home delivery. Other challenges we’ve seen were essential people and IT. I’m under no illusion that these things were in any way unique to us, of course!

We’re a small team here and the initial move to home working was very difficult for a lot of our team to cope with. It’s just not a feasible option for a lot of people, and for a lot more it’s not a desirable option, when you add in school closures and childcare to that, it makes for very difficult working. That’s a huge disruption and challenge at the best of times, but coping with that while trying to get your head around a highly dangerous and unprecedented global catastrophe apparently waiting right outside your front door – you couldn’t make this sort of thing up.

We did see a great response from the team and fortunately had some extra office space almost completed just before lockdown which meant we were able to manage with an onsite team well-spaced out and safe, albeit with no carpets or paint on the walls. IT-wise was really a killer of working from home for us as our systems and connections just weren’t set up to cope. We managed a pidgin operation at first, but calls were constantly dropped, connections would fail and the systems were so slow as to be ineffective at times. It was a massive relief to be able to get a core team back on site safely.

The brands we partner with were just as impressive as the retailers in adapting. With many of their traditionally strongest sales channels having been closed down overnight, these innovative challenger brands were also being forced off retailer shelving in favour of pasta, loo roll and bananas. To see the speed in which they reacted and got their DTC operations flying was amazing. These online channels are now major (if not central) parts of their scale up plans.