Richo Boss is only a few weeks into his tenure as chain director of Danish retailer MENY, but he already has aspirations on where to take the business. Stephen Wynne-Jones met him. This article first appeared in ESM Issue 2 2021.
Out of every crisis comes an opportunity, and for retailer MENY, part of the Dagrofa group, the COVID-19 pandemic led to double-digit sales growth in sales across its 112 outlets, as the retailer dubbed the ‘Waitrose of Denmark’ ramped up its quality offering for lockdown-inhibited shoppers.
Fast-forward to 2021, and there’s a new man at the retailer’s helm, following the recent appointment of Richo Boss as chain director, following a successful stint in leading Dagrofa’s Spar Denmark, Min Købmand and Let-Køb operations. Having worked his whole life in Danish retail – he held various roles at Coop Denmark and Dansk Supermarked before joining Dagrofa in 2018 – Boss is eager to maintain the solid growth that MENY has seen in recent years.
“In Denmark, the discount sector is dominant, accounting for around 50% of the market,” he says. “I see MENY as the opposite to that – we focus on service, wide assortment, and quality.”
StærkereSammen
Boss’s appointment is the latest in a long line of changes that Dagrofa has made to its operations in recent years, as part of its ‘StærkereSammen’ (‘Stronger Together’) strategy, aimed at strengthening the group’s positioning and encouraging its retailer partners to coordinate their efforts – “encouraging them to work together, so that they can benefit from the economies of scale from purchasing, logistics, and other considerations,” as Dagrofa CEO Tomas Piatrangeli told ESM last year.
For Boss, StærkereSammen has been instrumental in improving the competencies across the group, including its foodservice operations.
“I think knowledge-sharing is a key issue, both when you look at foodservice compared to retail, and also when you look at the different banners – MENY compared to Spar, for example,” he says. “There is no doubt that we are working a lot more closely together than we have before.”
The strategy has also helped focus minds during the challenges of the past year – “Retail has been up, but foodservice has been down,” says Boss – and enabled MENY to get closer to its on-the-ground operations.
“Communication lines with our retailers have been very, very important,” he says. “We have had periods when it hasn’t been a challenge, and then we have had periods when restrictions changed on an almost daily basis. To work with that, you need to have a strong communication line, directly to your retailers. That’s been important for us, to be able to, within a few minutes, communicate with all of our stores.”
Changing Behaviours
As Boss explains, while the pandemic has led to certain categories gaining pace – not to mention rapid growth in online – it has also led to consumers seeking more of an experience when shopping, and buying into the added-value positioning that MENY provides.
“If you look at how the market has developed in Denmark over the past 20 years, we’ve only seen one direction for the discount market – it’s gotten bigger and bigger, and stands at about 50% now,” he says, “but we’ve seen that, during the pandemic, it has become even more important for shoppers that, when they go out, they want the whole experience. You want staff that will engage with you and inspire you, and you want a wider assortment than you would get at a discounter.
“With this in mind, during the pandemic period, we have been steadily gaining market share. During the second lockdown, in particular, we grew at a faster rate than we did during the first.”
This doesn’t mean that MENY is putting all its eggs in one basket, however, and Boss understands that while sales are now surging, the post-pandemic period may require a readjustment, as economic challenges start to bite.
“For us, I wouldn’t call our position high end – it’s more a quality supermarket with additional service,” he says. “There’s a balance that we need to find – we are for the many, and not the few. We need to be attractive from Sunday to Wednesday, as well as for those who shop at the weekend. So, in our communications, we are very cautious about not coming across as a high-end retailer. We still need to run promotional activity, discount-matching – things like that.”
Values-Led Approach
MENY has also been proactive in embracing corporate social responsibility. The retailer recently teamed up with WhyWaste to fight food waste by digitising the best-before dates of perishable items. Since implementation, the new system has helped reduce food waste by up to 50% in some instances, the retailer announced in September of last year.
“This is not something that’s just important to us, it’s also important for the entire community, and society in general,” Boss says. “It’s still been an important focus for our consumers during the pandemic. Plus, as you know, food retailing is a margin business, so it makes good business sense to be able to control food waste.”
It has also engaged in customer-facing sustainability initiatives through its Grøn Balance private-label brand, such as removing microplastics from its household-cleaning range.
As for Boss’s personal objectives? While he’s not long in his current position, he tells ESM that he has spent “as much time as possible” on the road, visiting the group’s retailers – COVID restrictions permitting – enabling him to get a better picture of where the brand is going.
“I have a lot of ideas about how I can grow MENY, but first I need to know the people and understand the business – we are for the many, and not the few, as I said earlier – and our ability to compete is important. When you look at the map of Denmark, I think that MENY can have a greater presence. I see us becoming an even bigger player in Denmark in the future.”
© 2021 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine.
