Dunns Food and Drinks, in partnership with Scotland’s oldest football club, Queen’s Park, has announced a new initiative to support young people through Aware Scotland.
The partnership will see the club provide coaching sessions and experiences for young people facing adversity.
Over the next year, the partnership will deliver a range of initiatives, including free match tickets, mascot opportunity, bucket collections and training and match experiences.
Julie Dunn, Operations Director, and Jim Rowan, Managing Director at Dunns Food and Drinks, tell Wholesale Manager more about the charity initiative and their plans to grow the business.
What are your goals for what you want to achieve in the role?
Jim: People won’t want to come and work for us if we are not wanting to invest in them. So that becomes a real part of who we are, and that helps us grow the business. That helps us plan for the future because we’ve got the people in place. Our churn of staff is very low in the majority of departments. I wouldn’t say it’s very low in every department, because it goes in cycles. But we’ve got staff here that been with us 50 plus years. That is very unusual nowadays in today’s workforce, because youngsters come in, they chum, they see better opportunities. What we give them is good training, security, and hopefully they repay that by being loyal, which is really important to us as well.
How is Dunns currently performing as a business?
Jim: Part of what we have been doing for 150 years is to get to £50 million turnover by the end of 2025 and we’re well on target. We went into the pandemic very strong, but we came out of the pandemic with massive growth because we decided to hold on to our stock, we didn’t offload it. We worked on the basis that this can’t go on forever, the economy will break, and if it does go on forever, we’ll be dead. So, when we came out of the pandemic, a lot of our competitors had offloaded their stock, but we had stock. Customers came to us and became loyal, we service them. So, the last three years we have seen solid growth to get us to that £50 million. We are probably about 10% shy of it, we may not be at that £50 million in 2024, but we will certainly be flying by the end of 2025. We’re having good growth, but it’s the type of growth we want, it’s not vanity growth. This is designed growth going after particular sectors, we want to excel in speciality foods, specialty drinks, without moving into care homes, that is an area we’ve not looked at. We’re looking into private education, we’re looking into hotels, we’re expanding our customer portfolio, we’re pretty pleased with how things are going.
How and why did Dunns get involved in the partnership with Aware Scotland?
Julie: Aware Scotland’s founder is my nephew, Christopher Glancey, and he started it during the pandemic because he had always been part of a group of young people who took disadvantaged and disabled children to Lourdes and those trips had stopped during the pandemic. So, he and his brother and some friends felt very sorry for the children that they had worked with for years that this had all suddenly stopped for them.
They put together a group and went up to the north of Scotland. It is fabulous, it’s a group of young people that once you know who they are and you see what work they do, it speaks for itself. Our sponsorship includes giving them soft drinks and chocolate bars. They run a run a summer event program every Wednesday night, they also have yoga sessions, art sessions, they do day trips, they take kids sailing and they take them camping up to the north of Scotland. They’ve taken them to London, they take them to shows, they give opportunities to kids that don’t normally get them.
We thought the Queen’s Park partnership would give them exposure. They found that the social media activity increased. In Glasgow football is such a big deal, so Queen’s Park have embraced them, because they’re based outside of Glasgow. We just facilitated a relationship. I went to the Queen’s Park launch, and two of the boys from the group came, Callum and Liam, and they were actually thrumming with excitement at being in a football stadium. It was joyful, it makes you feel great about being part of something like that.
What kind of activity does the partnership involve?
Julie: There are some terrific opportunities there for young people. Last season, there was a wee girl doing photography, and so she got to accompany the match day photographer for one game. I think they’ve done some digital media work, and they can do match day collections. It brings them to the attention of a wider group. Once you know of them, you want to be part of it or to help them in some way. It’s good for them, for their exposure.
Do you have any plans to expand the business?
Julie: Going into the pandemic, our sales were split more or less 50/50 between food and drink. Coming out of the pandemic, that had turned to about 70/30 drink to food. Our growth plans are to carry on doing what we’re doing. Within the licensed trade, we’ve got the product range, we’ve got the team, but within the foodservice sector we’ve invested heavily in a new freezer. We’ve created additional storage space, and we’ve invested in foodie specific people. We have five chefs. One is an executive development chef, and four are chef reps who will go out and work with customers. The idea of that is to introduce more people to our really extensive ranges.
We are also investing in our draft dispense company and growing that, modernising it, offering new products and services, and looking at our traditional, soft drinks business, and re-evaluating that, and possibly looking at some new product development there as well.
Jim: One of the other things that we’re very keen on is local sourcing. Local sourcing doesn’t mean it’s five minutes from our work. It could mean within the UK. We think that’s something we should be looking to take on, because a lot of our products come from the Far East, from Europe, from America. They have a big carbon footprint, and it doesn’t really support the small businesses in the UK trying to get into production. And we need to start producing again. We are a nation of shopkeepers, but we now have to start to be become a nation of producers so that we can produce better quality products, so we can then push them out into the trade. We’re really keen on that, we call it local sourcing, but we don’t mean just local to Glasgow, Scotland. That’s part of our big plans.
Julie: There’s lots of people that do that very well already, with the whole Scotland food and drink identity.
Are you part of a buying group? What benefits do you get from being part of that group?
Jim: Yes, we are part of Country Range, which is one of the biggest buying groups in the UK, turning over circa a billion pounds. Country Range over the last year has lost a couple members but picked up more than that in new members. One of the great things about Country Range, it gives us critical mass, gives us great discipline, because if you’re a member, you have to support the group. You have to support the suppliers.
Suppliers like that. They don’t want to be supplying a buying group that’s a loose entity. When we take on a product, we give it the full amount of activity, so the suppliers walk away thinking, yeah, they’ve really helped me. We need the suppliers so being part of Country Range is part of what we’re all about.
But we’re also part of a buying group called Society of Vintners, which is a wine buying group. It is made up of members from all over the UK, I think about 20. We put our volume together. We buy containers from all over the world, including North America, South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. If we were on our own doing that, we wouldn’t be competitive. Society of Vintners allow us to be commercial against the very big players in the market. In addition to SOV, we have our own wine range. It complements those commercial ones. It’s the same with the food. We buy very well on food, but we’ve got our own range of food to complement the critical mass products.
How far is the geographical reach of your business?
Julie: It’s largely the central belt of Scotland, there are parts of Scotland that we don’t deliver to, we are largely central belt, and we have a northern depot in Aberdeen.
Do you have an e-commerce site for your customers? How is that performing?
Jim: Yes, we’ve got a web system platform that we’ve had for about seven or eight years. The pandemic really helped a lot of people go online because they had to, and that really helped our online offering because it meant that we could put more effort into online. We still have a full telesales department. Online for us is it can be a bit transactional, but 70% of our business is online, and 30% of it is collective, whether it’s email, answering machine, telesales. What we recognised very early on, is that although it’s a great online platform, we’ve got a very similar range to a lot of our competitors, and therefore it has to be something different. We phone our customers on a regular basis to tell them about promotions that may not be sponsored online. We do service calls with them. They are still online; they don’t want to place an order. We just phone them up and ask them every three weeks, how’s the service? Any problems, any outstanding issues, is there anything else we can do for you, and put that into the contact notes, then we revisit it. We are still getting that dialogue, although we’ve got sales people out there talking to them, we’ve got drivers talking to them, and we’ve got telesales talking to them. For us, the online platform is really important.
Julie: It’s not the only way of talking to them. It’s not that you replace one thing with another, you just enhance it.
Jim: A lot of the stuff that’s online, they can see the statements, they can see the pricing, they can see products. We’re looking at an app, which means they can track their order, but we’re not there with that yet. That’s a bit more complicated. We’ve got the same technology as everybody else, it’s how you use it to enhance your service. That’s what we’re about, enhancing the service, not just having all the whistles and bells to say we’ve got it and don’t use it properly.
How many products does Dunns supply and what categories do you cover?
Julie: In total, about 5,500 products, covering food – chilled, frozen and dry – and non-food stuff for kitchen use. In drinks, we have soft drinks, beers, wines and spirits. Anything that the customer is looking for, they’re likely to find it with us.
Are there any new products in the ranges you want to talk about?
Julie: We’ve got a lovely range called Brindisa, which is a lovely Spanish charcuterie range with cheeses and things.
Jim: The market is big, and people will say what’s the new trend? Pizza is still doing well; pasta is still doing well. Pan Asian is doing well. Retro foods are making a comeback, steak pie, mince and potatoes, those sorts of things. Our role is to listen to what the customers, the chefs are saying, and be first in the marketplace for that product, because you can bring in any new product development and miss the mark completely. We listen to our suppliers; we listen to our chefs. It’s very similar in the drink side. We listen to the suppliers; we listen to the brand managers. We listen to our mixologists, We listen to our customers. They’re the ones that feed back to us. We’re here to ensure that we’ve got the range to help them be profitable and allow them to be more cutting edge. It’s a really cut-throat market out there.
What is Dunns doing in the areas of sustainability and corporate social responsibility?
Julie: We’ve got solar panels. We didn’t get as many solar panels as we wanted. We deliberately went for a CO2 freezer, which is probably the most carbon efficient form of refrigeration and one of the most expensive.
Jim: Our sales reps all have electric cars. We’ve been on a sustainability path because it’s good for the business. All our cardboard and all our plastic is recycled. We have been doing that for years, because it’s good to get it off the premises. We have returnable glass; we are the only business in Scotland which does returnable soft drinks in a glass bottle. We have been doing that for 150 years. Sustainability is not a new word to us. Also, it ties in with Climate Partners, who are a group that measure our carbon footprint.
We were slightly ahead of the curve with the solar panels. We looked at solar panels five years ago. It wasn’t worth it. It became really economical when the price of gas and electricity went up with the Ukraine war, but we’d already committed to solar panels, and so during the day, we have free electricity because it’s all run by solar panels. Our biggest problem was the grid. The local grid will not allow us to put more on for us to store it so we can run it at night time. We are on a very economical charge through electricity. But our freezer allows it to run at a particular temperature. It doesn’t suck up the same amount of power.
All these things we’ve been doing for years, but the one thing we’re now starting to look at is scope 3, which is where products come from, originally.
Julie: We have invested £1.5 million. That includes a £1 million energy efficient CO2 freezer, solar panels and LED lighting. We also are part of the steering group of the Scottish Wholesale Association sustainability group, which is doing some really brilliant work with the Scottish Government. That’s looking at the scope three repercussions, and how companies like ours that don’t have sustainability positions within them, that’s how we can participate in that. That’s where being part of a buying group like Country Range is so helpful, or a trade association like the Scottish Wholesale Association, which is forward looking. You’re exchanging a lot of information with other people. Part of our corporate social responsibility is about participating within the community, to ensure that everybody locally and our employees benefit, that’s a big part of our responsibility.
How has the wholesale industry changed in recent years?
Jim: I’ve been doing this for quite a long time, I’ve been through a few recessions, a pandemic and a banking crisis. I think what wholesalers are really resilient, and they just go with the blows. In the last four years there was a pandemic that affected the customer base. Therefore, we’ve had to work really hard with our customers to make them more efficient, more profitable by ensuring that we’ve got the right range for them. We still do what we are good at, which is, we bring a product in, we store it, we deliver it. That is the raison d’etre of a wholesaler. If you distil it down, that’s what we’re all about. But what we’ve had to do now is be more collaborative with our customers and be more helpful. Hence the Executive Chef, hence the experienced guys that we’ve got in sales, the experienced guys we’ve got on drink because they resonate with the customer. They let them know what’s happening. They’re not journeymen, they’re experienced people who have worked at the coalface. They know what the pain’s all about, and they’re hopefully able to help them. So for us, I think being closer to the to the customer base, has been the biggest change I’ve seen in the last two or three years, and it’s been a good thing because it’s made us look at ourselves.
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