ECR Retail Loss

Enabling the Retail Sector to Sell More and Lose Less

Bakery Special: Insights on New Bakery Planning Systems and Complications at Self Checkout

Forty percent of food thrown away in a typical store is bakery, its a food surplus problem that CANNOT be solved by donations. In this meeting, we heard from a retailer who had developed a new bakery planning tool that used substitution logic to manage service levels over the course of a day, with a wider assortment at the start and lower, towards the end of the day. We then heard from a retailer who was wrestling down the dilemma between preventing losses at the self checkout from customers scanning wrongly, for example, pretending a €2 ciabatta loaf is in fact a €0.25cent bread roll and adopting a more targeted approach that would remove friction for the 99% of customers who would scan accurately. The full recording is available to retailers, if this is of interest, please send an email to colin@ecrloss.com but in the meantime, please see below a short video recap of the meeting with Richard Thalemann, Food Waste Advisor to ECR Retail Loss.

Banana's: The Case for Selling Bananas by Item Vs Weight

Selling and buying products by weight adds friction to the shopper journey, slows down the online order picker, requires retailers to invest in weigh scales in the aisle and checkout, while introducing the risk of errors and abuse. The case study retailer in this meeting carried 200 items in a typical store that are sold loose / require weighing and pricing per weight. Selling products "loose" and by weight, introduces a greater level of risk to loss, damage and waste Vs products sold in pre-packed quantities or standard weights with set retail prices. What we learnt in this meeting is that bananas used to represent 60% of the losses of loose products for the case study retailer and that they were able to improve losses by 30 basis points when they moved to selling bananas per item at a standard price (18 cents) The full recording is available to retailers, if you would like to see it, please send email to colin@ecrloss.com but in the meantime, please see below a short video recap of the meeting with Richard Thalemann, Food Waste Advisor to ECR Retail Loss.

New Research: What Is The True Cost of Food Waste?

Throwing surplus and out of date food straight into the dumpster is near zero cost. For many retailers this is not acceptable or responsible way to manage food surplus. However, there are multiple costs associated with managing this surplus responsibility out of the store, either into the homes of consumers, charities, for animal feed or for conversion to energy. This research aimed to identify those costs, and create a practical model that retailers could use in their business to guide and inform internal discussions, and decisions on the costs of prevention and new technology investments. The full recording is available to retailers, if this is of interest, please send email to colin@ecrloss.com but in the meantime, please see below a short video recap of the meeting with Richard Thalemann, Food Waste Advisor to ECR Retail Loss.

LAUNCH: Communicating Staff Dishonesty Student Challenge

At the end of June 2024 we launched our new collaboration project with the masters students [Marketing] from the Loughborough Business School, at the University of Loughborough. The project brief is below, we hope to publish the findings, results and new communication strategies in the second half of 2025. Background to the Challenge Staff dishonesty, often called internal theft, is hard for retailers to monitor, quantify, and detect. For example, one of the main “tools” available to detect internal theft is staff searching, however in a store setting, this is highly problematic to execute well and consistently. Further, it is seen as hard to prevent, especially through communications, as messages such as "stop stealing" are seen as counter to the goal of creating a culture of trust. At the same time, it is also very easy for retail loss prevention leaders to prioritise the more visible problem of external theft. Taken together, it is perhaps not surprising that efforts and the "lions share" of the investment in loss prevention are targeted at external theft, even though best estimates from retailers suggest that a third of losses can be explained by internal theft, which includes collusion Yet, and working on the assumption that staff dishonesty is a third of a typical retailers losses, its a good year if a retailer can capture and detect more than 5% of those losses. Thus, for most retailers, there is a significant detection gap. Closing this gap thus is a huge opportunity for retailers, for example, for a retailer with a 1.5% loss rate, and assuming no change in sales, a 35% reduction in staff dishonesty, would lower losses to 1.3%, a 20 basis point improvement. There are arguably very few other interventions that a loss prevention team could deliver, over the course of a year, that could have this level of significance to the bottom line. This student challenge will seek to find new and different ways to prevent staff dishonesty through communications and then publish data on the impact of advertising staff dishonesty to the industry in the second half of 2025. Staff Dishonesty Communication Challenge - Objectives. The challenge aims to discover new strategies to reduce staff dishonesty through communications and advertising. The students, allocated across five retailers, will first seek to explore with their respective retailers, their current approaches to reducing staff dishonesty. The students will then explore and identify new possible strategies and communications that could deliver impact. In the final part of the project, the retailers would then test the advertising campaigns in their business to understand impact, specifically, the levels of shrink pre and post campaign, to answer the question does staff dishonesty advertising work? t Timeline. Kick off - June 25th Competition Finale - October 16th Retailer Pre Vs Post Advertising Trials - First Half 2025. The report will be published in July 2025. For more information, contact colin@ecrloss.com

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FOCUS AREAS

The research priorities are determined by its members – they drive the agenda to ensure ECR delivers research that meets the need of the industry bringing new insights, tools and techniques that enables retailers to sell more and lose less.