NEED coffee? Take me to the cashier.

This note to shoppers is placed on empty bottles of Jamaica Mountain Peak (JMP) coffee in some supermarkets.

It’s not a clever marketing ploy. Instead, it is a measure implemented to stem the high theft rate of the product from the shelves.

The anti-theft measure was apparently implemented from as far back as 2017 when Salada Foods started noticing a 20 per cent drop in sales. The company’s investigations uncovered the avenue for the pilferage.

“It came to a peak in about 2017 when we were seeing a substantial fallout. In some accounts when we looked at the analytics it was as high as 20 per cent fall-off in sales. We had to dig and find out what’s happening. We had certain accounts where we weren’t seeing any kind of falling off and then there were certain accounts where our sales number was declining as high as 20 per cent. In further digging and talking to our partners [and] account owners we found out that there was a high surge in pilferage. People were stealing the Jamaican Mountain Peak bottles off the shelves and because of that it was exposing our partners to risk. They weren’t willing to take that risk on any more. They were reducing the number of inventory they had in store as that limited their exposure,” said Tamii Brown, commercial and corporate affairs manager, Salada Foods Jamaica Limited.

According to Brown, 10 accounts, seven of which are members of one of the leading supermarket chains in Jamaica, had experienced a collective 14 per cent decline in case sales, which equated to a combined total of $500,000. This was over a 12-month period from April 2015 to March 2016 versus April 2016 to March 2017. In one of the selected accounts the fall-out was as high as 20 per cent over the prior year.

Last week when the Jamaica Observer visited select Hi-Lo Food Stores and Shopper’s Fair Supermarkets, the empty bottles of the JMP coffee stood out on the shelves, stacked beside other brands filled with the main ingredient brewed to make the popular morning drink. At Brooklyn Supermarket, the product was under lock and key in a casing on the shelf.

Salada Foods commercial and corporate affairs manager said an initial response to the theft from stores was to move the bottles to the customer service area, which had a ripple effect of the brand being missed by impulse shoppers.

“It was as simple as out of sight out of mind. The more organised shopper goes in with a grocery list and shops from it. Of course, as you go up and down the isles you may see something that wasn’t on the list and you decide to pick it up. In distribution we call that impulse shopping. What we were able to deduce is that because they were taking the bottles off the shelf and putting it in customer service, we were losing out on the opportunities for that impulse shopper. If Jamaicans didn’t have Mountain Peak coffee on their grocery list, they often left the supermarket without it. That was a significant discovery for us and we had to find a solution. So we worked with many of our chains, did a presentation to the entire team and we brainstormed as we realised we indeed had a problem,” Brown said.

Subsequently, in July 2017 the idea for the dummy bottles or the Behind the Counter initiative was birthed as the most cost-effective way to reduce the pilferage.

“We looked at many solutions. We looked at the anti-theft caps, creating a casing on shelves and then we suggested that the simplest solution is best. We came up with the dummy bottle or the Behind the Counter Initiative. It was the most friction-less or seamless process for us to go about it. It allowed us to not interfere with our consumers buying practices. So the natural thing for the consumer or a natural shopper is to go to the supermarket, pick up your product, put in your shopping cart, go to the cashier and check out. We didn’t want to interrupt that process. So we created these dummy bottles,” Brown said.

In addition, the commercial and corporate affairs manager for Salada Foods said the dummy bottles have barcodes, which are scanned and a bill presented to the store’s in-house merchandiser who retrieves the actual product from customer service for the shopper.

Meanwhile, eight months after project implementation – fiscal year April 2017 to March 2018 – case sales increased collectively in the 10 accounts by 11 per cent over fiscal year 2016 to 2017. The account which experienced a 20 per cent fall-out in fiscal year 2016 to 2017, showed a 29.3 per cent growth in case sales in 2017 to 2018. In fiscal year 2018 to 2019, the 10 accounts experienced a further four per cent growth over fiscal year 2017 to 2018.

Further, the initiative has evolved to include closed dispenser at the cashiers, from which consumers can pull JMP coffee sachets, however the jars remain the big ticket items and market leader.

“We look at our analytics each year. We work with our partners and they do give us something called scan data, which shows us what the cashiers scan out in terms of sales. When we looked, up to the last calendar year JMP is the market leader in modern trade, so that does speak to the fact that we are very thankful in being the household favourite in terms of instant coffees,” Brown said.

But, the Salada Foods commercial and corporate affairs manager maintain that the business must be protected from pilferage .

“In an alternate world we would be very flattered that people would steal our product, but the business is first,” she said.