Unitas – Getting the best deals

Unitas’ annual trade show, held at the Exhibition Centre, Liverpool, gave members and suppliers the chance to connect and do deals.

The event included supplier and member briefings to communicate the group’s plans for 2026 and beyond.

An awards show in the evening rewarded excellence on the part of both members and suppliers.

David Cooke, Chief Operating Officer at Unitas, tells Wholesale Manager the goal of the show and the group’s new initiatives.

How many members and suppliers are attending today?

We’ve got over 170 supplier trade stands, and we’ve got a total of 910 people at the show today going to the awards in the evening, where we have 600. I think the 910 is the key number.

What is the goal of the show?

It’s a bit different to a retail trade show, which has a different objective, but we’re just upstream. We’re a trade show for suppliers to do deals with our members in the same way as a retail one. There are just fewer people, because we have 125 members, so that’s primarily who we have here today. This trade show is designed for our membership, to connect Unitas members to our suppliers. On top of that, at our supplier and member briefings we cascaded out what our plans, objectives and activities for 2026 and beyond are. And today we’ve unveiled a number of new initiatives, including first to wholesale initiatives that are being delivered by Unitas for its membership. The purpose of it is to do plenty of business, because obviously it’s tough trading out there, and we need to be very tight on how we structure our deals and partnerships. But then the second part of it is about laying down our strategies going forward.

How does the show benefit members and suppliers?

We’re a trading set-up, and everything we do is about getting the best deals, getting the best assortment and getting it to the right end consumers. That is our role, the purpose of why we come together. The role of Unitas is to come together as a group to maximise scale, efficiencies and effective return on investment.

Unitas has revealed its direction for the year ahead as “Think Bigger, Win Together.” How would you summarise this new direction?

Up against all the macro-economic landscape, the industry is having a tough time, and we can see that through the numbers coming out, and we don’t shy away from it. Having difficult trading conditions isn’t new, but nevertheless, we find ourselves in this situation. I’m refocusing Unitas’ role back to its core purpose, which is saying to the members and suppliers, we’re the UK’s largest independent wholesale buying group. We therefore have to take advantage of that. So, what do we do? We come together once again to maximise the benefit and think bigger. It’s a challenge to the suppliers and to the members to say, let’s form the projects and initiatives that can be brought now to maximise the return for yourselves and the members.

We want to encourage the suppliers to invest more back into us, so it becomes the win together. I said to the suppliers in the briefings, lean into us on activities that we can scale out and grow together as a group. And don’t come to us on those projects, initiatives, activities that you’re better off doing on a local basis. That’s the whole ethos of Unitas. I think it benefits them and it also saves their time. We’re listening to the suppliers. In fact, we’ve set up a supplier forum. It’s a committee of some of our key strategic suppliers. We’ll hold these committee meetings on a periodic basis as a test and learn to listen to them.

The supplier forum allows us to fast track ideas. It’s something that the show will take advantage of. We’re going to face all the elephants in the room and do something about it.

How is Unitas performing compared to the market, in both retail and foodservice?

In 2025, we published our results. In the last quarter of 2025 something really interesting happened, and this is using independent TWC data. Our retail outperformance was plus 2.1% versus the market, and our foodservice outperformance versus the market was 11 percentage points ahead. This is once again showing that our plans and strategy and direction are starting to work.

In our third full year, 2025, we had a tough time on foodservice and out of home. In 2025 retail was plus 2.4% in value, foodservice was minus 2.9% and on trade actually was quite impressive, despite the challenges it was up plus 1%. Volume was down by 1%. In retail, volume was up by 1%, foodservice was down by 5.8% and on trade was down by 3%. Given the challenging trading conditions and customer changes of behaviour, that’s understandable. But then, it feeds really nicely into the narrative of retail outperforming the market by 2.1 percentage points in the last quarter.

On foodservice, they put together really strong trading campaigns, and the members work really closely with their foodservice customers. So, it gave us a big spike at the end of the year.

What new initiatives does Unitas have to grow business for suppliers and members in 2026?

It is about partnership, hence the strap line. We’ve got a number of new initiatives. The supplier forum is about listening to the supplier so we can actually accelerate the ideas, thoughts and plans to scale them out. The challenge is to get compliance and promotions activated throughout our whole estate. For the suppliers, the challenge is to work with us on exclusive priced mark pack promotions, that will actually force compliance into the store. The quest for exclusive PMPs will differentiate ourselves from the competition platforms. That’s what we’ve always asked for. But the difference here is, in partnership, we deliver those exclusives. What do you need from us? And if it’s a certain number of commitments you need, we will honour those commitments and we will do what we say. It extends into the thriving foodservice division. We’re really dialling up foodservice now because it’s a significant part of Unitas. We haven’t spoken about it enough, and that’s my mission, to make sure we do speak about it more.

We’re introducing new quick service restaurant brochures to drive promotional and product awareness, and we’re setting up member and supplier sampling and brand activation days so we can actually drive the awareness of what we can do and increase business from a marketing perspective.

The really interesting pivot is coming out in our new playbook. As opposed to saying, we have a rate card, we’re talking about brand building. This hasn’t been ever done before. We think this playbook is the first to wholesale and exclusive. That’s saying the role of Unitas is to scale out your brands. This is the playbook for how to do it, and it’s all based on practical or real-life examples that have driven success. In 2025, we sat down at the senior supplier briefing, where we spoke to the C level suite of the senior directors, the suppliers and very much started this new approach, new way of thinking. This is the continued evolution of it. At the supplier briefing, we showed all of the percentage uplift for the great supply performances we’ve had across the year. We’ve taken all of those case studies and produced it into this playbook. And then we’ve married these examples of what components we have within the central unit test teams arsenal, in terms of trading and marketing activations, down to publications and brand building. It tells them exactly what they wanted to know. This will allow us to accelerate. We’re also committed for our private label suppliers, we will be doubling our sales in the old brand within the next three years. That is a firm commitment.

We have a very broad and diverse membership, 125 members. And every year in quarter four, suppliers do their branding. These are our big bets for the next year. These are how we activate them, and these are the ones to get behind. But there’s limited cut through, because it’s difficult for all of our membership to attend these days for various reasons. So this year, we’re going to be setting up virtual brand days. This is a first. I think they’ll work as well. We will have more numbers than ever because the live ones will still go, they will still happen. Across the whole estate, that allows us to align on all the big bands. It also unlocks those opportunities and awareness for some of our smaller members, they’re equally as important, but they have different challenges.

At the end of last year, we set up virtual supplier marketing clinics. They went down so well. We had 80 suppliers attend one session last year. The success has been overwhelming.

We’re starting them again this year, they go live in April. We’re also doing member marketing clinics. We’re becoming this hothouse forum of very practical and actionable implementation of brand building ideas.

Tell us about the supplier activations across the 5,000+ convenience retail stores across the Unitas membership. What kind of activity will this include?

We’ve got a 360 marketing activation which is not new, but we started a linked deals campaign with Pepsi and Swizzles last year. We’re going to continue and grow and accelerate that. We will do more linked deals. It’s customer centric, it’s linked deals associated with a particular shopping mission. We sell it through our cash & carries and warehouses and depots, and then it gets activated into the convenience stores, also with a 360 marketing suite, the theatre, and then the displays and the activations. When you go to buy one product, what else do you want to buy with that as well?

What will the revamped retail club and Plan for Profit look like?

By the end of this month, we will be conducting the most comprehensive qualitative and quantitative survey on Plan for Profit in the last 10 years. We’re speaking to 300 convenience stores and our top members and top suppliers, which gives a database position on where we need to take Plan for Profit, because it’s a great platform for getting supplier brands into the right stores in the right ways, but it hasn’t been reviewed for a number of years, and now is the time to do that. What will come out of it? I can’t tell you. I have an idea, but what it will involve is a revolution of Plan for Profit in its end to end entirety. Because when we get that right, it means that we can develop more great new symbol stores. Then the virtuous circle is closed, and then that the brands have better showrooms to show their brand.

How will the Unitas Focus on Confectionery Spring Seasons guide help independent retailers grow their confectionery sales this season?

The whole point and purpose of Focus on is a way of mass scaling key and relevant information for a particular season. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, or Easter.

How does it feel for Unitas to win more than half the wholesale trophies at the Scottish Wholesale Achievers awards?

I could not be more proud, because I think to have independent wholesale success is coming from pure entrepreneurialism. We’ve got United Wholesale Scotland, who have worked so hard to get those achievements. They’re saying, well, I don’t want to stop in Scotland. I’m moving to London. It is a lovely depot. They’re also saying, well, we’re not content. We’re not just going to London for depots. We’re going to London for convenience stores. So in February, this year, they started rolling out Day to Day stores, so they can continue that throughout the year, pushing the Unitas symbol numbers through. We’ve got 1,500 symbol stores, 3,500 fascias, and we’re servicing a further 10,000 independent stores.

I’m really pleased about the SWA result, they faced some really formidable competition. And more to the point, how do we do that next year? Let’s move on and do bigger next year.

Are rising costs going to be a challenge for Unitas in 2026 and how do you anticipate the group will overcome this challenge?

They will be a challenge, but they’re a challenge for everybody. The Unitas membership is not alone in this one. It’s been going on for a number of years now. The rising costs going up, the wars, the macroeconomic conditions, the rising price of energy, the tax on business, the National Insurance contribution changes, but everyone’s in it together.

Last year in Marbella, at our conference, we launched the AI Academy. The AI Academy aims to democratise artificial intelligence before the wholesale industry, so that it becomes relevant. We were presenting in the Learning Zone today for three sessions about how you can save money and drive efficiencies into your business by using AI. We have calculated that businesses who are using AI now are saving 8,000 hours a year by using the AI category, which is a modular, learning based platform system. It takes you from the point of knowing nothing to being able to code. We’ve produced AI generated planogramming tools. We’ve produced AI games which is a bit of fun but drives brand awareness. The efficiency gains are coming through. I think that that will be the differentiator. The wholesale industry operates on a skinny margin. How do you have that point of difference? Keep tight cost control and be more efficient with AI.

How is the Unitas own brand range performing?

It’s doing really well. Local Living and Caterer’s Kitchen are our own brand ranges. But today, I’ve unveiled that we will double the business in the next three years, and we’ve got a very clear, scalable plan in order to do that. But on the horizon is to go above and beyond that. The key thing is to make sure the time is right for private label, especially at wholesale. Costs have gone up but we have very good quality, high premium, but really great value for money products, and then that’s what the consumer wants.

We’ve got well over 350 products in totality, so we are growing the business. It’s right for the membership.