Bestway Vans Direct is set to reach its highest year of sales yet in 2023, with an expected turnover of £80m.
The bi-weekly service, which sees a team of sales reps go up and down the country delivering sweets and snacks to 21,000 retailers, aims to help retailers fill gaps on shelves and advise them on the next bestselling lines to maximise profitability.
They also manage fixtures, rotate stock, and put up PoS as part of the service.
The buisness grew 7% in 2022 and is the fifth consecutive year of growth since Bestway bought the former Palmer & Harvey-owned Snacksdirect and Sweetsdirect vans in 2018 after P&H fell into administration.
Now dubbed Bestway Snacks and Bestway Sweets, the business works with a swathe of major suppliers, including Haribo, KP, Kelloggs, Mars, Ferrero, Nestlé and Kettle, to drive product availability. There are 120 vehicles dedicated to the snacks division, with another 70 used for the sweets branch.
“Our ethos is working,” said Bestway Vans director Dan Lewis. “We are selling more, and helping our retailers make more through offering them an agile service to keep the right products on shelves and turn orders around quickly.
“The business is in great shape and I’m really proud of what the team has achieved across the last five years, during what has to be the toughest trading conditions the market has seen in decades”.
Bestway Wholesale MD Dawood Pervez told The Grocer the ongoing availability challenges across the industry were making its van service increasingly valuable to retailers in avoiding supply disruption, as well as making it another avenue for retailers to access NPD.
“Bestway Vans Direct sales are extraordinarily strong when it comes to new product development launches in the marketplace,” Pervez said.
“We are able to bring the product into the business, build all the relevant selling visual aids, bring any appropriate point of sale equipment and train our salesforce to present and share the product with over 20,000 customers.
“We can also merchandise any NPD to ensure we put it in the very best place to maximise sales pull-through for our customers. All of our customer sales reps will carry cases of the new product development into every store they call on, which is a brilliant technique to show the customers what the product looks like. At Bestway, we like to call it an ‘NPD explosion’.”
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