ITALY - UK PARTNERS

PARTNERSHIP | Spring 2020 18 T he ICCIUK recently released a report analysing the presence of Italian products in London’s main department stores. In contrast to supermarket chains, department stores’ food halls mainly focus on gourmet products, going beyond the classic “selling on shelves” experience and offering freshly prepared meals at the counter and food or drink tastings to the customers. For this reason, it is quite unlikely to find those well-established Italian brands that are usually represented in large retailer shops (such as Barilla or Buitoni). Consumers are more likely to encounter high-quality products of Italian SMEs that, thanks to the department stores and their high- spending customers, can gain their market share in the UK. This analysis focuses on four of the main department stores in London: Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason. The food halls of the above stores are arranged in similar ways, apart from the Harvey Nichols one that lacks fresh meat and cheese counters. The research considered both the flagship stores located in central London and their online shops. Some of the items were present in store, others just online, and in most cases both channels. In general, both the physical store and the e-commerce one were well stocked and none of two prevailed over the other. The data collection took place directly on the spot and through the analysis of their e-commerce websites. The selected articles were clustered into six groups according to the category which they belonged to (cheese, cold cuts, preserves, oil, vinegar and pasta) and were analysed according to the following elements: department store, available brand, product’s name, shelf and online prices. PRIVATE LABELS AND ITALIAN BRANDS The sample taken into consideration consists of 589 Italian products. Most of the “Made in Italy” products are produced and distributed by Italian companies; but there is a high percentage of items that, despite coming from Italy, is distributed by private labels companies registered in the United Kingdom (43%). British labels include, for instance, Seggiano, Dean&Deluca and Pasta Evangelist. Considering that the analysis took into account 90 Italian brands and 10 British private labels (excluding fresh products category), the latter prevails whilst we look at the average number of products per brand: 4 for Italian brands against 19 for private labels. PRODUCTS CATEGORIES An interesting figure is the small percentage of PDO and PGI products over the total of Italian items in department stores, which is just 9%. The products’ group that is the most represented in department stores is the Italian products in London’s luxury department stores A comparative analysis of the popularity of Italian gourmet food in the UK