Unitas shares plans and progress with supplier partners

Wholesale services group celebrates first year of trading

Unitas Wholesale spent its first birthday sharing its progress to date and plans for the future with senior managers from its network of key supplier partners.

Celebrating its first full year of trading, Unitas Wholesale hosted an event at County Hall, London, attended by more than 90 supplier partners.

Darren Goldney, Managing Director, John Kinney, Retail Director, and John Baines, Trading Director, shared the first year of progress, including retail, foodservice, on trade and specialist categories across its reach of 170 members and 177,000 customers.

“A year ago, we presented our mission for Unitas to be ‘champion of independents and champion of brands’, which remains our focus,” said Darren Goldney. “We shared our plan to move from a buying group to a selling group, to use our increased scale to be a relevant route to market for suppliers, anchored in efficiency and effectiveness.

“We set out 10 key elements that we would tackle to lower our operating costs and improve our efficiency as we merged two companies into one, and I’m delighted with our progress. We’ve already achieved eight, one is underway, and one launches in January.”

Alongside its transition from two companies into one, with one event programme, core range, own label, finance process, digital programme, promotions and one head office in Doncaster, the organisation will also be moving to one data platform in January, while one central payment system is under development. This, anticipates Unitas, will make the invoicing system more streamlined and take more than 50,000 invoices out of the system, freeing up more than £1m worth of suppliers’ time.

Suppliers were also brought up to speed on the newly launched Picture Portal, the enhanced roll out of Plan for Profit and the launch of a brand new initiative, Brand Box, which will enable suppliers to drive products directly into independent retailers.

Darren Goldney John Bains John Kinney Members suppliers Unitas Wholesale