Sainsbury’s in Scotland

Interview with
Callum Nimmo
Senior Buyer, Sainsbury’s

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Range finder

Sainsbury’s buyer for Scotland, Callum Nimmo, talks about local ranging with a smile and the patience of someone who has seen plenty of hopeful pitches and plenty of products that almost got there.

For Sainsbury’s in Scotland, local relevance starts with the customer, then works backwards to the shelf. That sounds obvious until a supplier walks in with a nice product, a good story and no clear evidence for why it should replace something already selling.

Nimmo is clear about the order of things. The decision is about whether Sainsbury’s customers in Scotland will buy it, keep buying it, and make the change worth making. It’s not about what he personally likes.

Home truths

He wants suppliers to arrive with their homework done. How many units per store per week should the product sell? How many stores could it work in? What sales and profit could it bring? Which existing lines should it replace, and why would those swaps make sense? When suppliers do that, he says, they make life easier because they give the retailer something concrete to test against. If the product launches and misses the target, everyone has a clearer view of what has gone wrong.

That is a useful lesson for any Scottish brand hoping localness will do the heavy lifting. A good story helps, as does a familiar name. But the shelf still has to pay its rent.

One of Nimmo’s most telling points is about “Scottishness”. He also wants a better view of which national brands matter more in Scotland than they do elsewhere in Britain. If two national brands look similar on paper, but one has a stronger Scottish pull, the Scottish team needs to know. He uses tea as an example, asking what it would mean if PG Tips or Tetley over-indexed heavily in Scotland. The point applies just as easily to water, bakery, meat or snacks.

There’s a nice honesty in that. It’s about backing the brands that Scottish shoppers already treat as theirs, whether they are Scottish, national or somewhere in between. It’s also about finding the next one likely to be treated that way.

That makes ranking data a map for such decisions. It helps buyers avoid backing the wrong horse, as Nimmo puts it, and it helps suppliers move the conversation from affection to evidence. A brand can still walk in with a good story. In Scotland, it had better bring the numbers too.