Over the past five decades, Company Shop Group has built up the infrastructure, logistics and expertise to handle all kinds of products and challenges, allowing obsolete, surplus or faulty stock to improve lives, protect the planet and create value for businesses. This is an organisation that has partnerships with 800 suppliers including blue-chip names like Amazon, Coca-Cola, Ocado and Mars.
Surplus goods can include perfect product in damaged cartons, unbranded packs or manufacturing errors where the wrong packaging has been used. Product trials and seasonal lines are also featured, along with missed, delayed, or returned deliveries. Imagine a chocolate cake made with too much chocolate: it might not be legal to sell it in the normal packaging, with the wrong ingredient quantities listed. At Company Shop Group, this fault can be dealt with through relabelling and the stock put to good use. The multi-temperature 125,000 sq ft warehouse in Tankersley just outside Barnsley has BRCGS accreditation and takes in up to 700 pallets a day of surplus goods from all over the UK – everything from avocados to Oxo cubes to Greek yoghurt. Sorting, washing and relabelling are routinely required.
The organisation operates 14 ‘Company Shop’ stores nationwide, serviced by daily deliveries. As a member-only controlled sales outlet, these surplus supermarkets allow selected shoppers who accept the premise of imperfection, to get a good deal on everything from food to toiletries and even clothes and homewares.
As part of Clare Bottle of UKWA’s warehouse visit, Trading Director Lee Wood took her to the new ‘Community Shop’ in nearby Hoyland. This sister-brand is a Community Interest Company, established in 2013 with a dozen very-low-price stores that offer an alternative to food banks and have collectively saved shoppers over £50 million. Families who are in food insecurity, living in a recognised area of deprivation and are in receipt of benefits can join their local Community Shop, which comprises not only a social supermarket, but also a community hub which delivers training, and a kitchen combining a cookery school with a canteen where kids eat free. The mission is to build stronger individuals and more confident communities, through a 16-week personal development programme that covers mental, physical, social and economic wellbeing.
In 2021, Biffa acquired the business. This might seem counterintuitive, but there is more than one way to manage waste and Biffa recognised the success of Company Shop Group’s model. Corporate partners love it because their warehouse space is freed-up from slow-moving obsolete stock; the goods are pushed up the waste management hierarchy, being used for human consumption instead of going to a recycling plant; yet these sub-par goods never make it onto the open market, where they might risk damaging the brand. It is a robust approach to sustainability, that is proven to work, with an efficient warehouse operation at its heart.
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