Industry Recognition
At the 2005 Food Industry Awards, the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD) awarded the food and grocery industry’s most coveted accolades. Smurfit Kappa UK was amongst those honoured on the evening, winning the celebrated Unilever Award for Consumer Insight for its Shelf Assured® toolkit.
The award is presented to a company that can demonstrate it truly understands the end consumer and has translated new insight to develop an innovative product or initiative, which has quantifiable business benefits.
Smurfit Kappa’s Shelf Assured® toolkit more than met the award criteria. The kit was developed following in-depth research into understanding the factors which influence the success or failure of shelf ready packaging. Smurfit Kappa discovered there is a hidden consumer within the supply chain who makes a critical difference to on-shelf availability in retail stores – the ‘shelf stacker’.
Smurfit Kappa recognised that the ‘shelf stacker’ has to identify, prepare and display products under difficult circumstances and, if the packaging hinders this process, it can influence potential product sales.
This understanding enabled Smurfit Kappa to construct a toolkit that assists its sales and technical staff in both educating manufacturers and retailers about the issues involved in achieving successful shelf-ready packaging and the solutions available.