Cook Up A Stirring Niche

How many times do you consider pursuing a deal outside your ideal?

I recently learn of a £100 million British retail success "very comfortable flying below the radar" (their own words) that decidedly never does so.

Elevating the longtime British culinary staple (first retailed there 1979), the ready meal.

Dismissively aka, Pingfood, TV dinner and Microwave meals.

For this supplier of premium frozen prepackaged meals, it seems that at their start twenty-five years back, focus was baked in.

Despite several overtures, they vigorously stuck to their route to market profile.

No supermarkets. No "fags 'n mags". No upright/shared freezers. No garden centres. No neighbourhood rivals.

Today, the fruits can be seen through 90 shops of their own, a total presence in over 1,000 outlets, and perhaps most impressively, the 1,600 jobs they provide.

Without doubt, beyond the calibre of their offering, the operational reason for their success is summed up by the family business' co-CEO; "The only thing we control is where the products sell from".

As listed in the five 'No...'s earlier.

Which could also be slanted the other way too.

• sell only from our own chest freezers (that partner vendor must buy)
• chest freezer can stock only our goods
• big supermarket avoidance
• foodie environment; proper food offer; fresh food
• retail partners have to be the only one nearby, so they don't crowd the area

(Let's leave aside for now that the vexed issue of 'cabinet exclusivity' clashes with my anti-restrictive practices belief here...)

For our solution sell purposes, there's a core five parameters here.

Surely a quintet like this for us is not much to ask when assessing our bid attractiveness?

It might not yet be a hundred-mil equivalent, but at least for now, What's yours?

/ ping /