In case you hadn’t noticed, Pick n Pay is in the middle of a major rebranding exercise. It has dropped the apostrophe, improved on its food line and has a new tag line: ‘Inspired by you”.
This, of course, means overhauling its atrocious convenience food, which is where Yvonne Short, the supermarket chain’s executive chef, comes in.
‘This is experiment number one,” she says, gesturing at the bustling Kitchen Café, Pick n Pay’s new restaurant at its Norwood store in Johannesburg. Short mentions some teething problems, such as the glowing photographs of food — they’re way too small and dwarfed by the brick wall behind them.
Short, previously the food and beverage manager for Conservation Corporation Africa game lodges for 20 years, has an infectious air of excitement about her. She’s also a committed Woolies shopper: ‘Who isn’t?”
Nick Badminton, CEO, can spout all he wants about the need to ‘move with the times” and how ‘customers’ lives are changing and they are busier and more challenging than ever”, but Pick n Pay simply hasn’t been trying hard enough. It has been content to serve up sub-standard fare while the only real competitor on the block, Woolworths, went ahead and beat it at its own game.
That said, Pick n Pay still has 34,8% of the total retail market and its share price is up 7,1% on the year. It is also converting all its Score stores into Pick n Pays, which will help the chain retain its lower LSM customers while new food lines and R110million worth of rebranding might persuade well-heeled customers that there is more on sale than polish and razor blades.
In the words of Peter Arnold, Pick n Pay’s general manager for fresh foods, the group is ‘trying to improve convenience foods … [and improve] the yardstick”. He admits it has ‘lost the edge” owing to ‘issues within the Pick n Pay structure”.
‘We are critically aware of what goes down in the industry, what the other guys are doing. You need to have a strategic focus on your own business and the strategy needs to be to improve our fresh offerings and stop customers from defecting to opposition retailers.”
This is where Short comes in and she’s lined up a range of tasty meals.
‘Our opening bid is bobotie, followed by macaroni cheese. These are core lines that we know are comfort food for everybody. We’re trying to reach a broad spectrum of people,” says Short.
So how do you produce a product that your customers will like and buy again? Say, a simple lasagne?
‘We eat lasagne at the best lasagne restaurants in town. We head for the one that’s the busiest; that’s where the families go. Short and her team of chefs and food technologists then recreate the dish, keeping a sample of the original.
The ingredients, too, are standardised. If the recipe says Roma tomatoes, then Roma tomatoes it must be, otherwise different tastes start emerging. The same goes for carrots — there is an optimum size — and the Pick n Pay team has photographs to prove it. Short mumbles something about the unsuitability of ‘horse carrots” that could, if nothing is specified, find their way into the meals.
A large part of Short’s job is testing different dishes, which naturally involves a lot of eating. A new Mediterranean range is undergoing testing at the moment.
We head for the aisles and immediately run into an elderly woman who can’t read the type — white on yellow — on the packaging of a Quiche Lorraine.
The new range is being phased in, so there are still some of the old-style offerings, such as tubs of grey tuna pasta salad and coleslaw. There’s also a pink mayonnaise that you’re supposed to eat with seafood. And I challenge any food photographer to make chicken a la king — of which a version can be found at Pick n Pay — look palatable.
There is also a new range of sandwiches, costing between R16 and R24, that were pronounced ‘lovely” by my daughter. There’s the ubiquitous tuna mayonnaise and chicken mayonnaise, a roasted vegetable sandwich that looks good and a three cheese and chutney offering.
Other things to try, says Short, include the ‘fabulous” porcini mushroom sauce, tomato soup and stir-fry sauce, which is thick and gloopy and has been gently spiked with ginger.
In the next few weeks there will be a new Asian range on the shelves as well as a ‘massive” range of snacks, including mini quiches, and meze such as hummus and taramasalata. Chilled desserts are also going to start appearing in the fridges, strawberry mousse, chocolate mousse and trifle among them.
Two customers walk past the fridge and I can’t resist asking: ‘Does it beat Woolies?” ‘Never.”