Meat is now one of the most-stolen fresh-food products from Australian supermarkets and specialty stores.
The latest Australian and New Zealand Retail Crime Survey reports an increase over the years in theft of meat compared to other goods.
The financial impact for a retailer can be dramatic – not only do they lose the product value and a sale, but they also potentially frustrate an honest customer who cannot find the item to purchase as its been stolen. Many retailers utilise their point-of-sale data for replenishment. If the retailer is unaware that the product is not on display, customers can become irritated and move to another retailer who does have the product available.
IGA Marketplace at St Lucia was experiencing high losses due to meat theft. After conducting a full department stock take the team noticed that financially the problem was larger than they had originally realised.
Thus, began their partnership with Checkpoint Systems.
Checkpoint began working with the IGA, St Lucia team to educate them on the effective practices to prevent meat theft. The TUV & ISEGA certified yellow food label was used a and prescribed as an effective visual deterrent. The tagging standards were established by the store and all meat products above $10 were tagged by the staff every day.
Prime cuts used to be mainly targeted by organised crime, but with the impact of Covid-19 the paradigm is changing, with financial pressures on Australian households, theft is opportunistic -purely for home consumption. This is not always as straight forward as stealing for sustenance but rather the psychological aspect of financial worry, frustration, and anger. In summary, meat remains one of the most attractive categories for theft.
The IGA saw an improvement of over 15 per cent in their total meat profitability since using the label. “It has halved our losses,” said Matt Puddiford, manager.
In addition to this, the store also saw a number of activations in their store’s security gates and on further inspection they actually found incidents of theft!
Matt also adds: “This quickly changed the stores perception as being an ‘easy touch’ which then had a positive knock-on effect in other high-risk areas. In the last two financial years the store has achieved its best stock loss results ever on record”.
The use of these meat labels combined with excellent customer service will ensure that meat products remain where they should be, on the shelf available for purchase.
Begin your meat protection journey today. Call us at 1300 369 338 or email us at sales.info@checkpt.com to trial our yellow food labels.
