M&S has announced it plans to extend its Fill Your Own trial to a second store in Manchester City Centre in March, as it looks to test the refill concept across different formats and locations.
M&S Food launched its first Fill Your Own trial in mid-December at its Hedge End Retail Park store in Southampton – offering over 44 lines of packaging-free cupboard essentials including popular cereals, pasta, rice, lentils, confectionery, coffee, dried fruits and nuts.
To help customers adapt to the new shopping concept, M&S is providing free, widely recyclable paper bags for customers without containers to hand and colleagues are available to guide them on filling and weighing the products.
Allan Hutchings
Marks and Spencer store in Hedge End, Southampton © Allan Hutchings Photography
However, behaviour change is already starting to take place as customers are increasingly bringing in their own containers or purchasing one from M&S’ range. Sales of M&S’ reusable storage containers have increased by 38% at the Hedge End store since the trial launched and by 10% across all M&S stores compared to last year.
Since the trial launched two months ago, 25 out of the 44 Fill Your Own products are selling higher volumes than the packaged alternatives, with customers buying over 2,600kg of product to date.
Fill Your Own joins other M&S initiatives to encourage customers to reuse, including free water refill stations at its Clapham Junction and Hedge End stores and a scheme to incentivise customers to use reusable containers and coffee cups by offering a 25p discount off hot drinks and food-to-go from Market Place.
Paul Willgoss, Director of Food Technology at M&S, said: “Our Fill Your Own concept is one area we’re focusing on as part of our action to reduce plastic packaging and support our customers to reuse and recycle. As a completely new way of shopping, we’re keen to better understand refill across the entire store process from behind the scenes operations to working together with our customers to encourage behaviour change.”
M&S will continue testing the refill concept at its Hedge End and Manchester City Centre stores before considering a wider roll-out plan for the future.