One week you win an award, the next week you have to recall off milk.
One week you’re dancing a jig because you get a trial in Coles supermarkets, but then you’re dancing on your own as you can’t get the stores to put in an order.
I’ve been to the Bendigo stores and there is a spot on the shelf for Bethune Lane Dairy chocolate milk with a price tag – but no stock.
The Swan Hill store is going great, mostly thanks to the amazing manager Chris, who is absolutely trying his best to help a local product, family and business.
I think we are selling about 70 to 80 chocolate milks a week in the Swan Hill store, which is really good. Our typical IGA might sell 30 to 50 a week.
The trial goes for six months in Swan Hill and two Bendigo stores – and if we pass we might get rolled out across Victoria.
If we get to that point, and then depending on any further success, a national rollout is not totally out of the question.
Do that maths – there are about 850 Coles stores across Australia – and you can see why the notion is exciting.
I’ve always been an optimistic dreamer, but if you could sell 40 a week across just half of their stores, then that’s 20,000 bottles of chocolate milk a week.
At some point we would need to dramatically step up from cute novelty to serious business – and there are only limited pathways to achieve that.
Through major supermarkets chains, distributors or independent grocers.
I think this is our fourth week and I have been struggling to extract orders out of the Bendigo stores.
My only contact in Coles has taken a new job.
I’ve tried ringing the stores (try 10 times) and the phone rings out.
You can’t have the manager’s number as that’s a breach of privacy.
I’ve been into each store twice.
But I still believe we will win that battle, it’s just time and constant gentle pressure.
What I learnt from my first experience with a supermarket chain is they are big, unwieldly beasts which initially take some manoeuvring, but once you are established in the system, the process becomes fairly simple.
We have a NSW chain with 26 stores and initially it was chaotic, and I reckon we did not get paid for the first three months, but now they are our biggest customer.
And we get paid weekly, on the dot.
Patience is a key virtue. Luckily for me, Sally has lots.
We had a batch of milk that went bad quite early, which is very embarrassing, and sometimes it’s really hard to work out why.
We did a batch on the Monday (no problem).
And we did a batch on the Tuesday afternoon, and again Wednesday (and again, no problem).
But the batch we did in the middle of the Tuesday morning went off.
A nice farmer rang to tell me, I went and checked in our cool room and our samples were no good.
We pulled the remaining milk from stores, although one said no, because the milk was great. So I went in and tasted a bottle, and it was perfect.
Test results for the batch were spot on.
How can some of a batch, where it’s done together, be bad, and some be good, and the test results all be good.
Anyway, sorry to anyone who may have gotten a bottle of dodgy milk, that is not a great way to grow customer satisfaction.
