Waitrose Unpacked moves up a gear and achieves supermarket first

Waitrose has become the first national UK supermarket to integrate unpacked items into regular aisles at its store in Wallingford Oxfordshire.

Following the addition of 13 Unpacked options in December, the store will offer 51 lines, including frozen fruit, store cupboard essentials such as rice, pasta and grains, cereals, dried fruit, snacking and coffee, as well as washing detergent.

We’ve topped the @GreenpeaceUK table of supermarkets for our action on #SingleUsePlastics, reducing them by 6.1% since 2017. We know there’s more to do – find out about our refillable groceries trial, #Unpacked, and plastics plan here: https://t.co/vLGiATF5yk pic.twitter.com/yE5nf0esnf
— Waitrose & Partners (@waitrose) January 26, 2021

A trial aims to understand whether customers could be persuaded to incorporate shopping for unpacked items into their routine supermarket trips, rather than visiting a separate part of the store.

Waitrose also plans to add more refillable products to the range later this year.

The Unpacked initiative launched in Waitrose’s Botley Road store in Oxford in summer 2019 and has since been added to a further three locations: Wallingford, Abingdon and Cheltenham.

James Bailey, Waitrose Executive Director, says: “Unpacked requires a fundamental change in shopping behaviour that has been ingrained for years.”

“This next phase will help us to understand if we can make refillables a routine part of customers’ shopping trips that would allow us to roll-out Unpacked further in the future.”