The pocket-sized supermarket supporting local suppliers
Let’s suppose you run a small homemade peanut butter factory. Every day you test and trial and taste until you have the greatest peanut butter on the planet. You want people to taste it. You sell at market stalls, online and drive many hours to deliver to customers that appreciate and love your product.
Even though you are truly passionate and have a great product to sell, in your attempts to get onto supermarket shelves, you hear ‘no’ all the time. It seems that getting your marvellous peanut butter to a wider audience is an impossible challenge.
Picnic loves to work with people passionate about food and we want all our customer to try products with a great taste. By collaborating with Picnic, an entrepreneur simply has to bring their product to one of our five FCs. Suddenly, this gives them a distribution network outside their normal reach and the opportunity to deliver nationwide.
Pocket-sized and flexible
For conventional supermarkets, it takes a lot of time and energy to adjust their assortment. This makes it hard for local entrepreneurs to get a product onto the shelves. On the other hand, Picnic is a digital service. The app store is innovative and our assortment is flexible. We can easily adapt and new products can be available within days. Giving our customers an ever-diversifying supermarket that fits in their pocket!
Regional products
Customers love local products. They are authentic and made with expert attention. Whenever Picnic launches in a new region, we include regional products into our assortment. To find the best local goods, I travel to various locations and meet with interesting and enthusiastic peoples. Local producers are so excited about their product and there’s always something new to learn. From honey with an unusual story, a group of talented beer brewing friends, to traditional bakers, I examine the possibilities of collaboration.
Brabantsche Worstenbroodjes
One example of a local supplier is Brabantsche Worstenbroodjes. For anyone unfamiliar with Dutch gastronomy, a worstenbroodje is like a freshly baked sausage roll (but better). The dish is typical to Brabant, a southern province in the Netherlands, and known and loved nationwide. In fact, the worstenbroodje has even been added to a list of Dutch cultural heritage!
The team at Brabantsche Worstenbroodjes is driven by the idea that most people only know the sticky, frozen version of worstenbroodjes. These just don’t capture the essence of what a worstenbroodje should be: a soft outer bun surrounding a rich tasting sausage. And even if people are aware of the traditional and fresh version, they have a hard time finding them outside Brabant.
By getting their product into our store, these food experts have come one step closer to making sure everyone can taste a real worstenbroodje.
Overnight, the bakery’s production grew from 100s to 1000s a day. The team is delivering over 8000 fresh worstenbroodjes to our F.Cs each week. Now, freshly baked worstenbroodjes are available across the Netherlands and increasing in popularity.
The demand for this Brabant dish has helped grow the business and they’re hiring extra bakers and new staff. They’re even making unique products for the Picnic assortment: in the festive season we’re selling a special Sinterklaasworstenbrood ‘S’!
Supporting local suppliers
The Picnic app and distribution network can be of great benefit to local suppliers. With our flexible assortment, we keep customers happy because they have the chance to buy diverse, regional goods. When we collaborate with small businesses, we ensure that passionate people can stick to what they’re experts in — making great products. And they can leave the delivery to us.
