Auckland emergency expo a 'lifeline' for local suppliers following New World fire
New World Victoria Park was significantly damaged by a fire on 17 June.
Photo:
RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Friday's Foodstuffs hosted
event connecting affected suppliers
from the fire-damaged New World Victoria Park store and new potential buyers is being hailed as a lifeline.
The gathering will bring together about 50 impacted suppliers and local Foodstuffs store owners from the wider Auckland area who may be able to range their products.
The Auckland supermarket was
significantly damaged
by a fire last week, with all products and items left unusable.
Photo:
Lucy Xia
Managing director of Supplier Collaboration Project (SCP), Jayden Kilpatrick, who represented six small suppliers at the New World Victoria Park supermarket, said today's event will go a long way towards improving their financial outlook.
"Well, round numbers for one of our suppliers, it's about 15 percent of their annual turnover just by this one store being impacted and closed," he said. "When you're a small, scaling supplier, one store has a major impact on your total revenue and livelihood.
"The size of New World and that individual store and that impact on their livelihood is essential. To make that up elsewhere, there's a lot of time and money that needs to go in behind that to generate that size of turnover in other stores."
"So we've got to mitigate that risk with them and their team and try and make up that revenue elsewhere."
Earlier this week, Foodstuffs North Island chief executive Chris Quin said about 70 small local suppliers were stocked at the store and that typically, these suppliers sell their products in 20 or fewer stores in the Foodstuffs network.
"It had a real farmers' market feel, and the customers who shopped there were genuinely curious and open to discovering new things. For many of these suppliers, Victoria Park was a significant part of their business - in some cases, the biggest outlet they had."
Many of the Victoria Park store's small suppliers were part of Foodstuffs' Emerging Supplier Programme, which provides guidance and support to local businesses getting started in grocery.
Photo:
Lucy Xia
Kilpatrick praised Foodstuffs for hosting the event, which he likened to a "mini-expo".
"It's potentially a lifeline for probably a majority of these smaller brands that rely on Foodstuffs and what they provide through their emerging supplier programme. To enable them to be able to present to a large portion of their business at a one-stop shop, reducing costs and overheads of having to travel to individual locations is an epic opportunity.
"You're talking to the main stakeholder of these organisations or stores, so it can potentially cut out a lot of the timeline and delays when we do present at a store level, which is fantastic."
Kilpatrick said he hoped today's initiative could catch on.
"We hope it's something that actually becomes a norm. I think it's a real good opportunity, especially for New Zealand's small emerging brands to speak directly to the main stakeholders, I think it's a great initiative."
Photo:
RNZ/Marika Khabazi
The
investigation into the blaze
was ongoing.
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