My Life in Sandwiches

A quirky article in the Guardian Weekly just before Christmas explored the subject of sandwiches. I loved it. It was a great example of the evolution of consumer preferences and the ability to firms to respond to them, in the specific category is food on the go. At Shell, I observed a small part of this revolution first hand, so that piqued my interest even more. I love these retail stories. This one links in some ways to the movie The Founder that I saw last year, and loved for precisely the same reason.

I am British, so sandwiches have played a big part of my life. Nearly all Brits eat a lot of sandwiches. Our style is for two flat slices of bread with some filling, often lined with butter or margarine. Nearly all cultures have something similar, but not exactly the same. As examples, the French love baguettes, the Dutch harder bread in what they call brotjes.

As a small child, I think at least one meal on most days included sandwiches. My mum bought the cheapest white loaf, along with most other Brits, a product already used as a loss leader in most supermarkets and sold for a few pence. It contained some preservatives, had a slightly sweet taste and lasted a few days. My mum was not a culinary expert, so her sandwich menu was cheese or ham with tomato or cucumber. This was enough to make me happy. But I did notice that when I went to play at our friends’ house, the Frews, their mum’s sandwiches were more tasty, because she put salt with the tomato and sugar with the cucumber.

At school, where we stayed all day until 8.30 at night, everyone needed a snack in mid afternoon, especially after sports. We were boys and had simple tastes and little desire to cook, so the school provided a four-slice toaster and an endless supply of white loaves and cheap margarine. Everyone consumed plain toast in enormous quantities.

As an 18-year-old, I left home and boarded at a house in a London suburb, commuting to the west end each weekday. I was given luncheon vouchers, two a day I think worth 45p each. I did what everyone else did. Once a week we would go out an have a cheap pizza or Chinese (Soup and B was the favourite, I recall), and other days we bought sandwiches from one of a number of holes in the wall, where a foreign guy made to order at rapid speed, because his entire trade was squeezed into a short interval at lunchtime. I probably ordered the simplest and cheapest items, but was still wowed by something like fresh egg mayonnaise. London had a big enough market for guys like that to make a living, but my guess is that in most cities people bought their own sandwiches in cling film to work.

My next sandwich memory comes from my time in Belfast as a travelling rep for Shell at 25, in the mid 1980’s. I spent many days driving around Northern Ireland calling in at petrol stations. I don’t believe any of those stations had anything for my lunch. I managed one for a time, and the dominant categories were cigarettes, candy and fizzy drinks. Other sales came from car accessories, magazines and stuff you might find in 99 cent stores like plastic containers. Unless I wanted to live on candy, I had to buy my lunch elsewhere. So I often called on what they called a home bakery. These didn’t sell sandwiches either, do my best bet was some fancier bread product with something like sultanas. Some days I just ate raw bread.

This is where the Guardian weekly article comes into the story. A genius working for Marks and Spencer had an idea, and started selling packed sandwiches in their stores, starting around 1980. It was not easy to make this work. Essentially, he needed a local army of hole-in-the-wall type sandwich makers near every store, and some sort of supply chain with vans. A lot was thrown away, but a lot sold as well, and margins were high. Gradually, Marks and Spencer improved the supply side, working on packaging, cool storage, demand estimating, and things like finding tomatoes that didn’t make everything soggy.

This single product line was the making of Marks and Spencer food courts, which gave the retailer a long spell of strong profitability as other department stores floundered. And before long everyone was copying the idea, learning the same lessons but ultimately changing the retail world. Pret a Manger started in the 1980’s, and now has stores in New York and Asia and Europe. This is a triumph of British retail ingenuity.

In Britain now, many people will have a wrapped sandwich or two for lunch. According to the Guardian, many of us will have exactly the same one every day. We can buy them everywhere, from staff canteens to convenience stores to fast food outlets, coffee shops and yes, petrol stations. In a separate article, I recently read that someone from Morrison’s (a supermarket) had become CEO of Gregg’s (a baker, not unlike those home bakeries in Belfast) and was turning the business around by focusing on prepared food such as sandwiches. Now in the US I often get my morning coffee from Panera, which is doing the same thing. In the Guardian article, people in the industry are focusing on making a sandwich a choice not just at lunch but at all the other times of day too.

The international side of this story is where my own experience feeds back in. In the early 1990’s I had a similar job as the one in Belfast, this time around Birmingham. By then Shell UK had caught the sandwich bug, as part of its push into food to go. My staff included a shop expert, and my sales reps started spending as much time focusing on shops as on fuel. I could even buy my lunch on site! Then in 1996 I was sent to Scandinavia, where the food on the go craze was in full swing.

It was a blessing to be thrust into the centre of this revolution. In some ways we in Scandinavia were the pioneers. We sold some sandwiches, but our consumers loved hot dogs more than anything else, and we became experts in all aspects of that business. On many stations, our shops were making more margin than fuels, and we became so confident (arrogant?) that we even started opening stand-alone stores with our Select brand. The rest of the world noticed, and Select became a huge initiative for Shell.

But then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped again. The stores were not making the money expected. Some petrol heads in Shell’s head offices challenged the potential of stores, then slowed things down, then franchised them out, then retreated to a former business model.

What happened? Well, there are many lessons, and I was almost uniquely placed to observe them, though I did not have enough skill to predict them nor to argue successfully for a different strategy. Our biggest mistake was to overlook that markets and cultures are different. Within Norway, some locations were perfect for hot dog sales but others not, either because of traffic patterns, competition or habits. Norwegians loving hot dogs did not mean Swedes would love the same ones just as much. In fact, Swedes live in larger cities, there was an established lunch practice called Dagens Rätt that covered most of the market, and if consumers there wanted anything it was mashed potatoes, a fact we learned, but later than we should have. Other European and Global markets had their own quirks, ones that a centralising and standardising multinational was never going to have the skills to understand – unless someone understood that centralisation and standardisation had limits.

So now I can sit in my comfy seat in Panera, enjoying my Latte and bread treat and my Guardian Weekly and reflect on all these trends. Shell was so near to a major breakthrough, but lacked the skills and patience, and even the purpose, to see it through. Marks and Spencer were lucky to have their pioneer, their locations, and their senior leadership to change their market via sandwiches. Pret a Manger did a good job too.

And somewhere out there is another massive opportunity, characterised by unmet consumer needs. With hindsight, even my own limited personal experiences as a youth were enough to spot the massive opportunity that was prepared sandwiches in the UK. Think hard enough and smartly enough and you might be able to spot the next one. It is not easy – or everyone would be doing it. But it is not impossible either.