Asda has abandoned its trial of dedicated refill stores citing operational issues and commercial challenges.
The supermarket chain launched its first eco trial store at Middleton near Leeds in 2020. It featured 15 refill stations offering household staples such as cereals, tea bags, pasta and cordial as well as refillable formats of household and personal care products such as shampoo, laundry detergent and hand wash.
Three further pilot stores followed, however in its latest ESG report published this month, Asda said it would be exiting the refill trials because refill, in its current format, remains too challenging for the business to scale and operate.
In the report Asda explained that: “Over the past four years, our refill trial stores have taught us a lot about the complexities of scaling refillable packaging. We’ve achieved some success in landing customer-facing propositions in-store, supported by collaboration with key suppliers and organisations such as WRAP and IGD. However, we have experienced operational issues and commercial challenges with our existing approach. Our research showed that the key barriers which included cost, convenience, cleanliness, and perceived product quality have prevented customers from engaging with the refill proposition.”
In 2023, Asda worked with the IGD and Hubbub to understand how communication can be tailored to customers to encourage uptake of refill. This included geo-targeted social media advertisements, in-store signage and updated digital assets. The work helped increase awareness about the affordability of refill zones compared to pre-packaged alternatives, but despite this Asda said customer uptake remained low.
Asda follows Tesco in retreating from refill after the UK’s biggest supermarket pulled the plug on its partnership with global reuse platform Loop in 2022.
Moving forwards, Asda said it intends “to deliver new, scalable refill and prefill trials that build on our learnings and improve customer uptake, operational feasibility and commercial viability”.
