M&S - mobile food to go service

Food To Go

Last week saw the expansion of Marks and Spencer’s Mobile ‘Food To Go’ service in Milton Keynes. This builds, no doubt, on M&S’s expansion into Simply Food outlets at various locations such as petrol stations and motorway service stations and the ‘order in advance’ LunchToGo services via their micro web site.

This move is all the more interesting when you recall the closure of a number of Simply Food stores earlier this year. It seems that the ‘new’ service has been run in pilot mode for some time in Milton Keynes and in Swindon, with two mobile units in each town. According to our local man there are to be two more units regularly servicing MK offices and another sixty across the country by the end of this year.

I’m not sure what the local sandwich shops and existing mobile vendors will be able to do to respond to this move, but what a great idea! It brings the all the convenience and quality of their packaged foods right to the doorstep of your offices, and in Milton Keynes’ outlying office developments, as in many cities, that’s a great timesaver as well as a way to buy quality lunch items rather than poor food value snacks.

Our two M&S associates say that the service has been an ‘instant’ hit. The most popular purchase being fruit. They also carry more exotic items such as sushi, which is also very popular. As you can see from the image below there is a wide choice available.

It made us think about the Category Management meetings that must have gone on deep inside the M&S offices, working out the strategy, tactics, goals, assortment, display planning and logistics behind such an apparently simple proposition. I’ll bet it was huge fun though. No doubt, time will tell if they have it right. You’ll notice that the assortment includes sandwiches of all sorts (upper left), various soft drinks, water and smoothies (lower left), the centre display houses wraps and more sandwiches, sushi and various salad choices and on the right are a wide rage of crisps and biscuits. It must have been a nightmare arguing that one out! One thing should be obvious though – all the product is M&S Own Label. Just what you’d want, I guess.

http://www.insightsinretail.com/category-management/marks-and-spencer-goes-mobile/