New supermarket offering lower prices opens in major city – Watch on TVNZ+<\/a><\/p>\nInstead of relying on central distribution centres and bulk orders as the major players did, Kai Co bought from local suppliers to save money.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can buy direct from meat suppliers \u2013 all of our beef and lamb has come from 30km up the road. So it sort of cuts out that big middleman,\u201d Vickery said.<\/p>\n
Producers didn\u2019t pay to have their products on the shelf, and meat was processed on site to keep costs down.<\/p>\n
\u201cI work in whole bodies, which means they get those bodies in cheaper… and the customer gets the best benefit of that,\u201d says Kai Co butcher Ricky McSeveny.<\/p>\n
The store is already attracting customers with specials such as 350g punnets of strawberries for $2.99.<\/p>\n
Industry experts said it was a bold move, but one store wouldn\u2019t break the grip of New Zealand\u2019s supermarket duopoly.<\/p>\n
Gilbert Peterson from the Grocery Action Group. said: \u201cI\u2019m very positive about what they\u2019re doing. It\u2019s a great initiative and it takes courage and a lot of work. <\/p>\n
“But if we had another 120 similar operations, then it would start having a big impact. Just one-off? Not so much.\u201d <\/p>\n
Tex Edwards, credited with breaking up the Telecom and Vodafone duopoly, said the real problem is food distribution \u2013 monopolised by Foodstuffs and Woolworths.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not OK just to break out one brand like a Pak\u2019nSave, because Pak\u2019nSave benefits from geographic distribution. You need what we call in economics a like-for-like ecosystem \u2013 a footprint of stores and a like-for-like product range,\u201d Edwards says.<\/p>\n
However, Vickery believed the Kai Co model could be replicated.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely doable. If you can have a butcher shop that sells meat cheaper than a supermarket, and a produce shop that sells produce cheaper than a supermarket, there\u2019s no reason why this can\u2019t be done more often.\u201d<\/p>\n
For now, customers were enjoying the savings.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all looking pretty cheap,\u201d one happy shopper said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s good \u2014 I think these prices are great.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next step? To see if it can be done again in other parts of the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new independent supermarket in Christchurch is hoping to offer cheaper grocery prices to customers. Kai Co says…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5003,133590,72841,67232,48756,14736,36980,9787,2518,89689,83756,111,43,139,69,8143,34890,1354],"class_list":["post-222752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-activity","tag-breed","tag-canine","tag-casual","tag-companion","tag-domestic","tag-emotion","tag-female","tag-green","tag-harness","tag-leisure","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-park","tag-walk","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}