Bestway Wholesale, the UK’s largest family-owned food and drink wholesaler that defined modern day wholesaling since inception nearly five decades ago, has shared its winning formula to support customers and stay ahead of competition as it continues to lead the way across wholesale and independent retail with ambitious plans for the year ahead.
According to managing director of Bestway Wholesale, Dawood Pervez, the Bestway’ promise is all about consistently stocking the right products, in the right locations to meet shopper demographics – and at better prices – to ensure retailers can make more margin, whilst investing all profits back into the business to grow and provide long-term stability.
It’s for good reason that the business has maintained its leading edge since the highly entrepreneurial, Sir Anwar Pervez, founded the business in 1976. Bestway attributes a large part of this to being independently owned, giving it the ability to mirror independent retailers own needs and respond with agility to market conditions.
“Our businesses was created BY independent retailers FOR independent retailers,” says Dawood Pervez. “Bestway’s approach to the wholesale market was a massive change to the sector in the 1970s and 1980s and it enabled thousands of convenience stores to thrive. Nothing has changed.”
“We understand wholesaling and retailing. For us it’s all about the customer, hence our investment is deep rooted into improving the customer experience.
“That means lower prices and helping them make better margins, allowing them to pass sharper prices on to the consumer. And add into this, a best-in-class range along with the right offer for every type of retailer including unaffiliated, symbol and franchise – collect or delivered – epos, web or app ordered. Our depots remain the kings of theatre and activation while managed in a way that retailers would expect – to ensure value is passed on to our customers.”
“How do we do it? This last year it has been through delivering leading promotions, keeping supplies consistently available, and helping customers navigate extraordinary economic conditions. And yes, it’s all about price and margins but there are value-adds which we provide here at Bestway, which have seen massive investment and have set the bar high for any competitor to follow. We run our business as efficiently as we can so that we are better able to invest in price.
“For example, consumer mapping aligned to stores, providing unique forward insight and sharing of market trends, and making new tech available to customers in line with fast-changing use of ‘smart’ tech, and digital enhancement”.
2023 is set to look like a year of further market leadership from Bestway. With its 57 depots across the country, accommodating a total selling space of just under 6million square feet (that’s the equivalent of 89 football stadiums), Pervez has promised that the year ahead will see Bestway continuing to invest in forward reserves of stock to counter forward inevitable price increases from suppliers and protect its customers for longer, saying:
“The year ahead will see us maintain the best prices in the business. In fact, our obsession with price has been applied to the KVIs that drive 80% of our business, leading us to benchmark these key SKUs with interrogation – looking at price elasticity and now feeding this into our promotional build.
“Our customers have confidence to shop these key lines from us, the lines are monitored and benchmarked ongoing – we’ve taken the legwork out for them.
“In addition for 2023, we have further homed in on data and insight to shape our strategy and share with retailers’ insights into shopper behaviours, changing missions and how our category performance indexes versus the market. We can now pinpoint changes across categories and move fast to support the changing missions.
“For our stores, this has culminated in the development of the industry’s most respected business growth programme (Shopper First: Drive Five To Thrive) which includes location mapping and store audits for POS development to drive uplift in footfall to stores and pin-pointing individuality of stores and shoppers”.
Bestway’s investment into the technology of the future has also included the launch of WhatsApp for Business, for all customer types ensuring retailers receive up-to-the-minute promotion and pricing information. And it’s working well – already in little over a month, Bestway is reporting that customers are making a 9% extra spend through this platform.
Pervez concludes: “We believe in listening to our customers and responding. Hence, a big part of what we do across our stores is shaped by our ‘Galactico’ team of well recognised retailers who meet to discuss business and share ideas that we take on board for future development, the team are advocates for our offer and work closely with our management team.
“So whilst supporting our fundamental position of best prices and great margins for retailers, we really do understand the struggles and opportunities to support where it’s needed and have invested 100% in this space to deliver more to customers than any other wholesale in the sector.”
