Retail Ready Packaging (RRP) has been identified as a key way to address the industry's £3billion on-shelf availability problem. This week ECR UK launches a free guide to help suppliers understand how they can unlock these lost sales through adopting RRP.

In a year-long project, ECR UK brought together branded and own label manufacturers with retailers to define what constitutes RRP and how it can be best adopted to the benefit of manufacturers, retailers and the consumer. As a result a new free guide - ECR Retail Ready Packaging Blue Book - has been published.

Retail Ready Packaging seeks to radically improve on-shelf availability and involves the total redesign of the outer packaging to smooth the product's journey from stockroom onto the shelf and into the shopper's basket. The blue book provides a comprehensive guide to RRP, it identifies the steps that businesses need to take to adopt it, provides tools to help with choosing the right RRP and explains how to evaluate the business case.

Tarun Patel, IGD programme manager, said: "IGD research found that 90 per cent of shoppers experience products that are hard to find, damaged or unavailable. RRP is a simple idea which has practical applications across all retail categories and can address all of these problems, which lead to poor on-shelf availability and currently costs the industry three billion pounds in lost sales.

"This blue book will enable suppliers to gain a quick appreciation of RRP and understand how it relates to their products. They will then be equipped with the know-how to open a constructive dialogue with their retail customers and collaboratively develop cost effective RRP solutions that will benefit all."

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