Renée Elliott: the inside story of Planet Organic’s turnaround is a ‘small miracle’

Renée Elliott is tired. But exhilarated. It’s been two years since she returned in a blaze of glory to rescue Planet Organic, the high-end organic retailer she founded in 1995, from administration.

“It’s been insane. It’s been exhausting. You know, I’ve worked hard before. I’ve started two businesses and I have three children, but I’ve said to people: I think this is the hardest I’ve ever worked and the most fun I’ve ever had,” she says with a smile.

After being “pushed out” of Planet Organic by private equity investors Inverleith in 2017, Elliott says her return has been “a business fairy tale”. So how has she turned it around? The starting point was basic: “The shelves were empty.” But it was also about rediscovering “the highest product standards in the country for organic food” that Elliott had set when she opened the first 5,000 sq ft store in Notting Hill 30 years earlier.

That meant ditching the likes of Huel and Little Moons – two of the high-profile brands delisted last year in Planet Organic’s range review – a decision that “wasn’t difficult for me”.

“The truth is, I hadn’t been into a Planet for a while. So I was like: ‘why are we selling this stuff?’ And I gradually got the story from the team that they’d been instructed to move away from organic and become more mainstream.

“One of the reasons they went into administration was they walked away from what makes Planet what it is – values, organic, all of that,” she says. “So, we redefined the product standard, and we immediately cut out the obvious disasters. We’ve been the authority in this space since 1995 and, when you have a business, you know your customers. And our customers aren’t coming to us for Huel.”

Now Planet Organic is “back in our lane”. A range reset that took 15 months. “But it’s been a full-on two years of pulling Planet out of the mud,” she says. With sales down 50% from where they had been, “we didn’t know if we could do it. And now we’re at break even, which I think is a small miracle.”

Planet Organic is even projecting a small profit this year, progressing to “a reasonable profit” in its next financial year from September.

More Big Interviews:

• How Nicola Robinson’s food sourcing alliance is taking shape

• Kris Boger on his mission to grow sales on TikTok

• Allan Leighton on deep pockets, loyalty cards, bench strength and online

• Farshad Kazemian: the butcher on a sustainable mission

Elliott is quick to credit the Planet Organic team, who were “exhausted and had not been treated very well” yet still “pulled together with us in those first few months, May, June, July, August”, to help stabilise the business.

And then it was about setting out the business plan for the new financial year, which runs from September, “and we had probably 50 or 60 projects we had to land: cutting costs, increasing sales, loving the team, getting back to organic, looking at all the processes that had fallen away”.

Alongside this was a “massive” cost-cutting process, which has been revisited more than once due to the prevailing economic winds. “We’d done our [latest] budget, and then we got Labour’s, so we had to go back and look: where else can we cut? And it may be that we open for slightly fewer hours, or we open a little later in the day. But we’re not at that point right now,” she says.

“And we will remain absolutely committed to our values. We will not sack members of our team to cover the costs. If team members leave and we can’t replace them because we’re being squeezed to death by everything, we may reduce our hours a little bit. And we will not whack prices up. We’re trying to be savvy and nimble and creative, which is what you do when you’re faced with a recession or economic downturn.”

Refurbishing the stores

After unfruitful negotiations over store leases led to the closure of Planet Organic’s Balham and Spitalfields sites, next on the agenda is sprucing up its eight remaining stores. “The previous management had not been investing in the sites,” Elliott says. “So, the stores, to my eye, are a mess. But the team within them are doing a brilliant job. This year is refurbishing, replacing, to get it beautiful again.”

Elliott’s keen eye will also be required to navigate the minefield that is the UPF debate. She insists it’s relatively easy for Planet Organic to determine what’s healthy thanks to the expertise within the business, but thinks it’s become “very difficult” for consumers.

“Companies are making all kinds of claims on packaging that aren’t supported and, quite frankly, I think it’s appalling, it’s so disingenuous.”

Elliott says it’s hard to say for certain whether there’s a place for any ultra-processed foods at Planet Organic, because “the definition is being argued about”. But since coming back in, she and the team have gone through every product category, from nut butters to tea, and set a new standard for each of them.

“We just reviewed honey, and it’s so exciting,” she says. “But honestly, customers have no idea the work and research we’ve done for it, all the elements we’ve looked at. So we need to communicate that better. We’re going to make our own standard for what is UPF – based on, obviously, the world definition – but we’ll be really honest about how we interpret that, because Planet has always been authentic, transparent, honest.”

For Elliott, coming back to Planet Organic was much more than just returning to a business. It was like “coming home”. And just like an eager homeowner, even with the business now stabilised, it’s clear there’s still plenty of tinkering for this self-confessed planning addict to be getting on with.

“The goal,” she says, “is to polish the business now until it’s beautiful and runs like a dream.”