The brand has become the first national supermarket to integrate unpacked items into its regular aisles at its shop in Wallingford Oxfordshire.
The news comes after the grocery store chain was ranked first in Greenpeace’s annual league table for its efforts to reduce plastics across its portfolio. Waitrose pioneered the launch of its refillable range – Waitrose Unpacked – in some of its shops in 2019 to trial customer demand.
Today, rather than having a single unpacked fixture, the store will offer 51 lines, including frozen fruit, store cupboard essentials such as rice, pasta and grains, cereals, dried fruit, snacking and coffee as well as washing detergent. This trial aims to test whether customers could be persuaded to incorporate shopping for unpacked items into their routine shopping trips. In addition to confirming plans to add more refillable products to the range later this year, it underlines Waitrose’s ambition to explore the potential to scale-up Unpacked in the future.
James Bailey, Waitrose Executive Director, said: “Waitrose Unpacked requires a fundamental change in shopping behaviour that has been ingrained for years. This next phase will help us to understand if we can make refillables a routine part of customers’ shopping trips that would allow us to roll out Unpacked further in the future.”
