DELI LITES – how we adapted our business model to continue meeting our customer’s needs
Written by Sian Mcveigh, Deli Lites.
The global Covid-19 Pandemic and the resultant lockdown in the UK, Ireland and across Europe had an immediate impact on our sales revenue and how we serviced our customers. The nature of our Food-To-Go business – delivering fresh daily to every part of Ireland and exporting frozen to GB and European markets; meant we had to act fast and with clarity.
In the initial days of the crisis, acting on government and expert guidelines, we straightaway communicated to our partners the measures we were putting in place to safeguard customers, staff and our supply partners. As government restrictions on movement and trading took effect, unfortunately, many of our valued customers had to close sites whilst others battled to stay open despite massively reduced footfall coupled with the challenges of implementing social distancing and other safety measures in their stores. Like many businesses, we had to consolidate our product offers to deliver our best-sellers, whilst supporting our partners.
Despite the restrictions for people-on-the-move, consumers still want high-quality, convenient food offers for lunch and other occasions during the day, even if that day was spent entirely at home. Our loyal consumers could not reach us by the normal bricks & mortar retail, so we had to go to the them; linking up with Shopify, we rapidly launched our Home Delivery service deli-lites.deliverni.com.
The immediate uptake and support we received from our long-standing plus new consumers, was truly outstanding. Sales took off instantly with no marketing budget available. Going direct to consumers via Ecommerce was already in our plans, but the onset of the Covid crisis accelerated its introduction.
In addition to delighting consumers, we were also able to use the Home Delivery platform to get closer than ever to end users – testing new ranges such as Mexican Meals and providing wider accessibility of existing products, none more so than the huge sales increase we saw in sweet bakery offers such as our ‘Made to Share’ Salted
Caramel Brownie and Belgian Chocolate Caramel Square delilites.com/products#skip-bakery.
Being part of the community is at the core of DELI LITES, that includes supporting those most vulnerable and recognition of those helping us all through the health emergency and keeping the country moving. We used our time to support a number of initiatives; linking ups with organisations like Feed The Heroes, Robin Hood Project and local sports clubs, to provide food packages to NHS staff, key workers, emergency service providers, local GP surgeries, and other community workers. We are in a fortunate position in food production to be able to support in this manner, but it is also a big credit to how our team mobilised to action here.
As with almost every industry, the Covid crisis has been a very tough for our employees and staff of our customers. At DELI LITES, our internal communication during this period has been first class – the whole team pulled together adapting to everyone working from home, fully utilising tools such as MS Teams and Zoom. There was vital on-going communication with customers, whose trading and closed. These included our first remote Web Tasting with a major client across 4 European locations, similar events have followed and will continue in the ‘new normal’. Regular account meetings will re-start but in a very different format and may evolve over the coming months. Our current focus is supporting our partners as they build back up their business, re-opening from partial or full closure; we of course fully appreciate this will not be easy for anyone.
In recent weeks, we have seen green shoots of recovery, as retail opens and restrictions on movement as eased. Our partners in convenience, forecourts and grocery retail who have remained open throughout are now growing week on week; export orders of our Heat-To-Eat ranges have returned; and we are working with customers as they begin re-opening.
A lot has happened with more uncertainty likely to follow however, our team, customers and suppliers have shown incredible resilience, adaptability and learnings that we can take with us as we look to the future. I want to take the opportunity to thank our customers, consumers, staff, and suppliers for their support during this period and as for the ‘New Normal’ – we are ready!
Exhibiting name: DELI LITES Ireland
Stand number: J48
Website: www.delilites.com
