view from the shop floor
Food for thought Garden centres are evolving and food will be their future!
David Little has been the managing director of Poplars Garden Centre in Toddington, Bedfordshire since 1999 and is the fourth generation of the Little family to control the company, whose horticultural roots go back to the 1890s. Poplars receives visits from around a quarter of a million customers a year and turnover is in excess of £4 million. It is also a proud member of the both the HTA and GCA, of which David is an executive committee member and area chairman of the North Thames branch. Here David continues his contribution to our ‘view from the shop floor’ series.
These are exciting times in the garden centre industry. The next 10 years will see a new generation of retailers emerge from existing garden centres. In fact I think the term “garden centre” has just about reached expiry for some retailers; diversification has drastically altered the face of many traditional garden centres and the mix of products on offer is wider than ever.
I
suspect you could find just about everything a supermarket may offer on the shelves of at least one garden centre, somewhere in the UK:
perhaps the only exception is electronic products and white goods. Over the years I have seen everything from golf clubs and fishing tackle to woolly jumpers and caravans on sale. Clothing and food halls have been ‘en vogue’ for the last few years and now it seems the next step into food retailing is about to happen. There are two developments that I know of that
are currently being discussed by two well established and well respected garden retailers. Tesco and Dobbies are developing this in East Kilbride and news has broken recently of Garden and Leisure’s discussions with Waitrose regarding Percy Throwers Garden Centre. I wonder if the small store format that the large retailers have developed for the high street will begin to appear on garden centre sites. This could happen very quickly and I’ll explain why. Grocery retailing in
18 Garden & Hardware News By David Little
the UK is the best in the world. It’s also incredibly competitive and highly profitable. Market share is vital: those who have the biggest share of the market wield the most power. The UK grocery market is amongst the most innovative and the most copied. How many times have we seen a major supermarket introduce something new that is replicated by the other grocery retailers as quickly as they can get it on the shelves? Not one of them dares to get left behind. So it stands to reason that if one or two grocery supermarkets are now looking at garden centre sites then the rest will follow – very quickly. There may well be a feeding frenzy as grocery retailers race to secure the biggest sites on the most prestigious garden centres that serve an affluent local population. This hasn’t happened before for two key reasons: there was previously no real history of food retailing on garden centre sites and local planning issues stood in the way. These two things have changed completely in the last few months. Planning rules must no longer stand in the way of jobs. If a planning application creates employment then it has a higher chance of succeeding than at any time in the last 20 years. Look at most large garden centres that have been built over the last five years and the vast majority have what we call a farm shop or food hall. Other retailers call it a little supermarket or small grocery shop. A national chain of farm shops, food halls, specialist grocery stores and mini supermarkets (call them
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