D&W FINDS COUNTING CHICKENS PAYS

ROSEANNE HARPER

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Tracking sales performance by store has sent rotisserie chicken sales flying at D&W Food Centers here.

Sales tripled in four weeks after the 25-unit chain put an accountability program into action, said Michael Eardley, senior director of fresh foods. By now, in at least one of its stores, D&W is selling a rotisserie chicken to one out of every seven customers who come into the store.

"We'd been selling rotisserie chickens for 15 years, maybe more, but we never sold many until we started communicating what we expected, and the results, to every store, to every associate in every deli, every week," Eardley said. He addressed the subject during the recent annual food-service conference of the Food Marketing Institute and the National-American Wholesale Grocers' Association held in Rochester, N.Y.

"It's known [internally] as our WOG program. We here all know WOG means 'without giblets,' " he said, explaining that while the designation is commonplace in meat departments, he figured it could be used to catch the attention of deli associates. "I have this idea that you have to assign some crazy name as a hook," Eardley said.

"The first thing we did was to start tracking unit sales. Who sells the most, who sells the least. We'd send a congratulatory note to the top-selling stores. Then late in the spring when chicken sales were going wild, we decided to take it to the next level by finding out how many WOGs per customer we could sell," he said.

Customer traffic varies considerably among D&W's stores, he said, explaining that the next step was a refinement in both tracking and accountability.

"We found that our top performers in unit sales weren't necessarily our top performers," Eardley said. Sales per customer was a fairer way to compare a store's sales performance, he said.

"You can hold your people accountable for selling to their market, but not for bringing in more market," he said. Now each unit is graded on how many WOGs it sells in relation to how many customers the store has. "We take the weekly customer traffic per given store and divide it by the number of WOGs sold that week," Eardley said.

He began with a benchmark of one WOG sale per 150 customers, which last spring was the average. Now it's one sale per seven or eight customers in some stores, he said.

"We make everyone fill out a WOG chart showing how many they produced and how many they chilled. We don't have shrink. We'll sell them cold, and on Caesar salad, in our chicken spread or in any number of recipes," Eardley said.

From a merchandising standpoint, each store is now held accountable for having chickens going around on the rotisserie from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

"Everybody has their own standards, but this is ours. The last batch goes on at 7:15 in the evening, and it must go on. The program's working. Everybody's trying to improve their WOG performance. "I walk into a store now and an associate is apt to right away tell me proudly that she has her WOG-to-customer ratio down to one per five," Eardley said.