A founder rang me a few weeks ago, my number having been passed along by somebody I had not spoken to in a long time, wanting to know how to get listed in Co-op and whether the deck he had already built for the supermarkets would do the job. I talked at him for far longer than he can have wanted, then wrote most of it down afterwards, which is what this is. Partly because I keep being asked versions of the same question, and partly because Co-op is, I think, the meeting founders prepare worst for, and they prepare badly in a very particular way that is worth getting down properly.
Quick word on why you should listen to me at all. I co-founded LoveRaw, took it into 13,000 stores across 25 countries, raised money, did the Dragons' Den thing, and along the way sat in buyer meetings at most of the big UK grocers, Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, Boots, Carrefour, and yes, Co-op. Co-op is the meeting I would prepare most differently if I had it again, and not because the buyer was difficult, they weren't, but because the shop is small and the customers own the company, and almost nothing in a supermarket deck survives contact with either of those two facts.
Small first, because it's the one founders underestimate even after they're sure they've understood it.
Co-op runs somewhere around 2,400 food shops, and a typical one is 2,500 to 3,000 square feet, which sounds like an abstract number until you work out that it's roughly a tennis court. Now stand in the middle of that tennis court and find your category. It might be a metre wide. Possibly two, if it's a big category, and somewhere in that metre the buyer has to fit tonight's dinner, the meal deal, the top-up shop and the small treat somebody buys with their milk, which means every single facing has to be earning its keep every single week. There's no end of aisle nine where an interesting newcomer can sit for six months finding its feet, the way there might be in a big supermarket, because there is no aisle nine. There's barely an aisle four. When I finally understood that, properly understood it rather than just nodding along to it, I went back through our own deck and found that about half the slides no longer made much sense, including, painfully, the brand story ones I had been proudest of when we made them. Nobody in that building had any use for our story until the velocity numbers had done the talking first.
So that's small. Now for the ownership part. Most founders skip straight past this bit, I think because it sounds like the sort of trivia that lives on a heritage page somewhere, and I will admit I skipped it myself for longer than I should have, but it is not trivia at all, it may well be the single most commercially useful fact anywhere in this piece. More than five million people hold a £1 share in the Co-op and a vote to go with it. They're members, they're loud, they turn up to things, and they genuinely shape what the business does, which changes the buyer's brief in a way you can actually use. If your sourcing story is real, if the ethics on your pack are load-bearing rather than decorative, and only you really know which of those is true, then this is the one room in UK grocery where that actually gets rewarded commercially, rather than politely nodded at the way it tends to be everywhere else. And if your ethics slide is wallpaper, well. This is the room where wallpaper peels.
The membership also does something to your maths that catches people out. In March 2025, if I remember the timing right it was March, Co-op matched Aldi's prices on over 100 everyday essentials, for members that is, and member pricing has since become baked into how those shops trade day to day. So run your margin at the shelf price, then run it again at the member price, and both versions of the sum have to be able to live, not just the flattering one. The second calculation is the one founders skip, nearly always, and it also happens to be the one the buyer will be doing in their own head while you're still talking, which is an uncomfortable thing to find out afterwards.
Right, on to the ways in, because there are a few more of them than people generally assume, and the famous one happens, at the moment at least, to be the least reliable of the lot.
The famous one is The Apiary, the incubator, and everyone asks me about it, fair enough, it has put real brands on real shelves, recent graduates have gone into 80 and 600 stores for their first listings, which for a young brand is a proper start. The catch, and I'd call it a genuine catch rather than a footnote you can wave past, is the timing of it all. The fifth intake opened in February 2026, recruitment was then paused that April during a wider review, and at the time I'm writing this nobody has said when it restarts, or indeed whether it restarts. So do check where it actually stands before you go building a plan on top of it, and honestly, if you want the advice I would give a friend, build the whole plan as though the thing does not exist at all, and then if it comes back later you can treat that as a pleasant surprise rather than a rescue you were counting on.
The normal route is the category buyer at range review, much the same as it would be anywhere else, and everything I'm about to say about the deck applies to that conversation just as much.
And then there's the route I would actually take, the unfashionable one nobody emails me about. Co-op owns Nisa, the wholesale business, which took the name Co-op Wholesale in March 2025, and which at the last count I saw was supplying somewhere around 1,400 independent partners, who between them run something in the region of 4,000 shops, though the exact figure presumably moves about a bit. Get your product moving through there and you're quietly building up convenience velocity data, from real tills near real houses, long before a Group buyer has heard your name, and when you do eventually sit down with one of them you're not asking anyone to imagine anything, or at least you shouldn't be. You're showing them their own kind of shop already selling your thing, which is a much easier conversation to have.
Which brings us to the deck itself. I wrote about the ten-second rule in why Tesco rejected your deck, the buyer deciding on slide one before you've finished saying hello, and it applies double here because this buyer has less shelf to gamble with. What they're scanning for, underneath everything else that might be on the page, is some kind of proof that you have genuinely taken on board how small their shops are. Size of prize worked out on their 2,400 shops, never on "UK grocery", a phrase which tells them, all by itself, that you did no work. Rate of sale is the other thing, ideally from tills that sit near actual houses, so forecourts, indies, a Nisa listing if you took the advice I gave a few paragraphs back, and honestly almost any of those will do the job, whereas a hypermarket number means close to nothing in this room, and the buyer, in my experience anyway, quietly discounts it the moment it turns up on a slide. A case size that a shop with no stockroom can actually take, and I do mean no stockroom at all, that isn't a figure of speech or me exaggerating for effect. The delivery arithmetic of many small drops, because two cases a week into 600 shops is, once you sit down and actually cost it out, a different company from ten pallets into one depot, with a different cash cycle and different everything else besides. And margin at both price tiers, with a straight answer ready on who funds the member deal, because they will ask, and "we hadn't thought about that" is a long walk back to the car park.
One more thing on expectations, because it saves some disappointment later. Your first listing will probably be a few hundred shops, sometimes noticeably fewer than that, and I do want to be clear on this point, because those 80-shop starts are not an insult, however much they can sting on the day the email actually lands in your inbox. What is actually happening is that Co-op is testing you in the places where the data is cheap for them to gather, which, once you stop taking it personally, is the system working more or less as it was designed to. If you sell through, the listing tends to grow, sometimes faster than the buyer originally hinted it might. If you spend the first review meeting sulking about the size of the number instead, in my experience it very much does not.
So, here is more or less the short version I gave him on the phone, tidied up a little for public consumption. Get one honest convenience proof point, even twenty indies will do. Rebuild your price architecture around member pricing before the buyer does it for you. Check where The Apiary actually stands rather than assuming. Then build a deck for a metre of shelf rather than forty aisles, and that last bit, the actual rebuilding, is what I ended up making DeckSmith for, partly because I got tired of watching founders redo the same surgery by hand every time; you feed it your product and your numbers and it writes the Co-op version in the shape a Co-op buyer is actually going to read it in, and the decks I've built that way have gone on to do close to £16 million in retailer sales between them. No magic bullet in any of it, but the deck is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of a brand, and that first look is worth more than founders expect. And if the supermarkets are still on your list, Sainsbury's is a different meeting again, and that one I have also written up.
