Earlier this year, Sainsbury’s CEO Simon Roberts unveiled the grocer’s “Next Level” strategy as it looks to become the first choice for food among UK shoppers.

One of the supermarket’s key commitments includes achieving further food volume growth ahead of the market, as well as ensuring its full range of food is available to more customers, as only 15% of its supermarkets currently offer the full selection.

This will focus on creating additional space for food in around 180 higher potential stores over the three year plan, which it expects to be a key driver of grocery volume gains.

Sainsbury’s store in Cobham, Surrey is one of the retailer’s ‘labs’ for its test and learn approach, where over 100 “experiments” have been trialled. 

While not every new or revamped store will be an exact copy, the site has been providing Sainsbury’s with real insight into what could be rolled out more widely in the future.

More space in the Cobham store has been given to food, with a “quite different” look to a traditional Sainsbury’s supermarket, according to Roberts. It now offers more fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and poultry.

Making Sainsbury’s easier to shop

In this store, it’s been particularly important for Sainsbury’s to change its product presentation to ensure it is as easy as possible for customers to shop.

An example includes the fish or dessert aisles where a section for frozen products, which complement the chilled products, are placed side by side, rather than on opposite sides of the store.

Roberts explains: “If you want to buy some really big langoustines, rather than running all the way over to frozen you can buy them next to fresh fish. We’ve done the same in desserts, so you can buy ice cream next to chilled desserts.

“If you think like a customer, rather than how we run a supermarket for 25 years, it causes you to lay things out differently, because we shop like a mission.”

When Sainsbury’s started its ‘Food First’ strategy, one of the changes it made was to remove its fresh fish and meat counters as the supermarket believed they resulted in more wastage.

However, the Cobham store now offers a “fish counter on a wall” concept, with all the species of fish you would expect to buy at a counter, stored in the same aisle as other fish products, at a lower cost and with a larger range available.

Roberts says that Sainsbury’s is “seeing really fast growth” in this category due to the range being so much bigger than it was previously.

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Dedicated ‘Free From’ areas are also something that Sainsbury’s is rolling out “really fast”, according to Roberts.

The space includes all of the Free From products that the grocer offers, all in one location.

While Roberts says that it might seem “really obvious” to put these products together in this way, he adds that it’s “quite a big thing for a supermarket to do differently”.

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To make the big weekly shopping mission easier, the store also offers areas with products that aren’t typically found together but are suited to one another. An example of this includes the speciality cheese section, alongside a selection of wine pairings.

Roberts adds: “The key theme is more products in the space and then making things easier to shop.”

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At the Cobham store, beers, wines and spirits has also had a revamp, and this section now offers every single product that Sainsbury’s sells in the category, which Roberts says is important as “being able to have a full range of things really matters”.

With the retail sector having experienced unprecedented levels of crime over the past year, the new store layout pays attention to where higher ticket items, such as beer, wines and spirits, are housed.

At Cobham, these products are presented in a wide, open space in the centre of the store, which is more open, bright and with more staff able to have they eyes on the area, which in turn is driving an uplift in sales and reduced shrinkage.

This section also includes smart shelves, where if someone takes multiple bottles of spirits off at the same time, the shelf will send an alarm out to alert colleagues – a precaution that has been used for quite some time.

Some of the biggest challenges for Sainsbury’s when considering how to improve the checkout area has making it easier to buy a bigger trolley shop.

At the Cobham store, the retailer offers Smart Shop, alongside a completely new generation of self-checkouts, as well as typical manned tills.

However, the grocer is trialing a hybrid checkout, where a scanner has been placed on a normal checkout, providing the shopper with more space to place their bigger trolley items to scan and pack.

While Roberts says this has proven “popular” among shoppers in Cobham, he adds that “taking out more manned checkouts doesn’t mean we won’t have them, it just means we’ll give you more choice for how you pay”.

While this hybrid checkout is currently only in two Sainsbury’s stores and is still being tested, Roberts says “it’s an example of how you stare at the problem differently and give customer the choice back, rather than perpetuate either a high cost solution or one that doesn’t give customers choice. So, real credit to our team for the way they’ve done this with our technology partners”.

Credit: David Parry/PA Media Assignments.

For its clothing offer, the supermarket has tried to create a different look and feel with a range of fixtures and updated presentation.

Roberts says: “We’ve been really improving our ranges. There’s a lot still to do in clothing, but we can see clearly, if you have big trolley shoppers, they want to be able to access really appealing clothing ranges of great value and really good style.

“The uplift in sales we’ve seen here has been really substantial. You look at the price point and then you look at the style, we think we’re getting to a much stronger position here.”

As part of a trial, the store also features a couple of touch-screen stations which look to help customers in a number of ways, from finding the specific location of an item in-store, to suggesting recipe ideas for food products.

A more efficient Sainsbury’s

Within Sainsbury’s strategy update in February, the grocer also unveiled plans to target cost savings of £1bn by March 2027 to finance better prices for customers and higher pay for its workers.

This comes on top of the £1.3bn it has already achieved over the past three years. When the programme is complete, the group will have cut £2.5bn of costs over the past decade.

Roberts says: “The only way we can continue to be as competitive as we are or invest in the things we want to, is deliver that efficiency. In this store, there’s lots and lots of experiments on efficiency, whether it be stacking beer more efficiently, whether it be changing the checkout.”

To create further efficiency in this store, the warehouse has also been rearranged so that it’s no more than 60 steps to the fixture of its highest volume lines and it has changed the amount of space of high volume lines so it’s filling them up less often on the shop floor.

Although this is a test site with features that may not roll out to every other new or revamped Sainsbury’s store, the Cobham supermarket provides a real insight into how the grocer is looking to switch things up by putting its customers shopping journey front of mind.

From digital innovation to simply giving more space to food, the retailer is well on track to building a “next level” Sainsbury’s as it strives to win more shoppers and bigger baskets.