Tesco: 66 points for Dave Lewis – No.23 – Healthy Living

Today is 44 (forty-four) days until Dave Lewis takes the helm at the UK’s biggest retailer. Grocery Insight are counting down to the start of his reign with an improvement point per day. Due to the growing nature of the list causing issues with our template, please click on Tesco to see all the posts containing the 66 ‘to do’ points. Today we consider the ‘health tier’ – Healthy Living.

One area where the discounters can be beaten is healthy eating, the limited SKU assortment means that the addition of the healthy tier is difficult when trying to offer the ‘full shop’ to customers. The larger retailers do a decent job on healthy food without being ‘world class’ with a lot of the battles taking place on ready meals / fresh categories.

In January, the ‘lighter choices’ range was replaced by ‘healthy living’ complete with the multi coloured person / butterfly logo. The range change was well executed in store and ties in well with the food first strategy. A relative success for Philip Clarke and his range changes.

So whilst this was a success, Dave Lewis needs to capitalise on healthy living, make it a core choice rather than a ‘trade’ for customers if they are trying to lose weight. The discounters can’t do an adequate job in health as they simply don’t have the range flex, eating healthy is atop of many agendas and will only become more important with the fall in consumer spending and rise of the discounters.

Healthy Living is a difficult one for customers, no one wants to be on a diet particularly but healthy eating isn’t all about that, the issue with the business is typically January is the big focus post the excess of Christmas. Healthy Living should be the epicentre of the business. Within core OL and in its own tier, Tesco need to be different and going down a health / affordable route could strike a sweet spot.

The relaunch was relatively well done, so for Dave Lewis its less about solving ‘Healthy Living’ as a tier, more about working this into the values of the business. Would ensure a differentiator versus the discounters for sure.

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