Foodservice wholesalers are rapidly evolving into fully-fledged advertising platforms. Whereas banners or promotions in leaflets used to be the norm, companies such as Bidfood and Sligro now offer increasingly sophisticated forms of retail media. These include sponsored products, brand pages and data-driven targeting based on purchasing behaviour.
This development offers brands a direct opportunity to increase their visibility at the very moment of purchase.

We strongly believe in this development. Wholesalers have access to rich first-party data about the target group: food professionals, the actual purchasers of the products. This allows campaigns to be much more targeted and relevant than with traditional media.

The Issue

Aviko saw the potential of retail media in wholesale channels, but did not have the capacity to properly explore these new opportunities. This led to an assignment within the ongoing optimisation process to quickly gain concrete experience with this new form of brand activation.

The Solution

We assisted Aviko in setting up, filling and optimising various forms of retail media content:

• Brand pages: inspiring brand pages that told Aviko’s story and presented the entire product range in a clear and concise manner.

• Sponsored products: sponsored positions within search results and category pages to give new products and activation campaigns extra visibility. With a limited budget, the limits of all possibilities were explored and several rounds of optimisation were tried out.

The results

The use of retail media provided Aviko with additional visibility during important promotional periods.
Playing with sponsored products in particular has yielded many insights. Unfortunately, we cannot share all of those insights here. Overall, we have learned a great deal about search behaviour and purchasing behaviour within the Bidfood Webshop for Aviko, and this experience has cost us very little: the ROI was very respectable.

As wholesalers continue to rapidly develop Retail Media, we are keeping a close eye on these developments and are eager to explore all new opportunities to find the most effective ways to be visible in these channels.

Vera Ten Zijthoff, Foodservice Marketing Manager, states:

Through our collaboration with GROUP7, we were able to get involved in Bidfood’s latest development: sponsored products. This was an educational experience for all parties involved and a valuable new way to stand out in the journey of the food service professional!