Taking a slice of the cake
Cycling through the unexpectedly hilly countryside around Rutland recently, my son spotted a chalkboard on the roadside stating the Village View Cake Shack was open for business. This was just the distraction we all needed from yet another incline on the horizon. Turning down a side road, we almost missed the Shack because it turned out to be a modest wardrobe-sized shed housing a variety of lovely, packaged cakes, cookies and sweet treats, operating on an honesty-type basis with a QR code and the owner’s bank details available for those people without cash.
We’d encountered similar scenarios of goods in front gardens on the Isles of Scilly a couple of weeks previously, where we had purchased some very tasty home-made fudge among other things via bank transfer, using the individuals’ details provided. Such initiatives are never going to move the dial on the food-to-go category, but it does highlight just how much this market has exploded in recent years, with everybody seemingly getting in on the action in what is a rapidly growing segment.
More than £48bn was spent in the out-of-home market in 2024, representing a 14% year-on-year increase, according to data from Kantar. And the predictions suggest the category will continue its impressive upwards trajectory over the next few years, with the result that by 2028, the Institute of Grocery Distribution reckons it will have increased in value by almost 40% on 2019 levels.
Cycling on from the Shack to the historic market town of Oundle (notably flatter terrain as we crossed into north Northamptonshire), we came across a Co-op that had a rather impressive area near the entrance dedicated to on-the-go purchases. It included a coffee machine, slushy maker, shakes and smoothie machine and a couple of glass cabinets housing a variety of packaged hot goods that rivalled the proposition from Greggs.
This discovery coincided with the news that the Co-op has embarked on a major move into the foodservice sector with the launch of its first “On The Go” store, in Solihull, which is 25% of the size of a regular Co-op convenience store. Such is the confidence the company has in this new concept that it already has imminent plans for another 15 units and intends to be operating several hundred such stores over the next two to three years.
The offer includes breakfast goods alongside freshly made sandwiches, as part of the company’s first counter service, available in the morning through to bagels and bowls for lunch, and from lunchtime onwards, it has a range of in-house cooked pizzas. The proposition certainly places Co-op in direct competition with many hospitality brands on the high street.
Matt Hood, managing director of Co-op Food, says: “This isn’t a scaled-down version of your typical Co-op. This is ground-up reinvention, a blurring of the lines between grocery and quick service restaurants. A new format for a different kind of customer, in a different kind of space and location. No tobacco, no ambient aisles, no health and beauty. Just a tightly curated selection of food and drink, built and developed for right now – led by a new standout hot food serve that anchors the experience.”
The new concept has one more powerful weapon in its armoury – although the stores close their doors to customers at 7pm, they then morph into “dark” delivery-only outlets. The Co-op has made a big play with its quick-commerce grocery service available from its thousands of convenience stores – it aims to have captured 30% of the UK’s quick convenience market by 2027 – and it will be leveraging this expertise with its “On The Go” stores.
The company works with all the third-party delivery platforms and has its own white label delivery solution it sells into other convenience store retailers, which utilises the infrastructures of the like of Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Co-op has also become the first national partner of Just Eat with its new delivery-as-a-service Jet Go platform that further fuels the Co-op’s quick-commerce capabilities.
Combining this with its “On The Go” concept suggests the company is in a powerful position to play a meaningful role in the food-to-go category on many high streets across the UK in the future. With traditional retailers venturing ever deeper into the foodservice sector and independents, from minnows like the Cake Shack upwards, entering the space, there is certainly set to be more competition. This suggests the incumbents will have to continue to work hard and push through ever more innovation if they are to grab their share of the growing food-to-go category.
Glynn Davis, editor, Retail Insider
This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Retail Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.