Some elements of the Tobacco & Vapes Bill making its way through Parliament will help forecourt owners capitalise on the vape opportunity, suggests Park Garage Group’s head of operations.
Speaking at last week’s National Convenience Show, Ian Cawley said measures for a reduction in vaping flavours, and a licensing scheme to control who can sell tobacco and vape products would be beneficial, by reducing illegal sales, stabilising prices and making it easier to control stock inventory.
Cawley, whose Top 50 Indie runs 80 forecourts, told the ’Vapes: What does the future hold?’ panel : “I am actually in favour of the licensing. For us as a retailer of convenience stores across the country, it would be phenomenal because if you go into any phone fixing shop, or barber, or hardware store they are all selling vapes, which is driving the prices down for us across the board.
He added: “It is bit of a race down to the bottom at the minute”, asserting that restricting licences ”would help us massively”.
Meanwhile, banning variants like pink candy floss would discourage under-age sales, he said. But he questioned whether the proposal to move vapes from the shop floor to behind the counter would stop products falling into the wrong hands.
“I’d like to think that when the Bill comes in, they will reduce the flavours and take away the silly name ones, as I call them. I think that would be a massive step change.”
He added: “That would help us longer term and give us a bit more sustainability in the category, because at the minute with all these new flavours coming out it is just impossible to range all these new products, and you don’t know which ones will be the new in trend.”
Not knowing which flavours to back causes “quite a large tail in your inventory”, he said.
Panelists were less positve about the introduction of tax on vapes this October, with six months’ grace to sell through unstamped product after that. Hemanshu Patel, national vice president of the Federation of Independent Retailers, said that retailers will be hit hardest, as they strive to keep the cost of products at a price consumers can afford.
Andrew Dignam, chief commercial officer of vape supplier Phoenix 2 Retail, said that retailers need to be mindful of being left with illegal stock which is not duty stamped from April 2027. He said that to keep products affordable there is likely to be some ‘shrinkflation’, with slightly smaller format products.
Cawley agreed that margins will fall. “I think we will go back probably to slightly smaller devices around £5,” he said. “We have probably been very lucky with margins we have been getting over the past few years if the truth be known.”
The panellists agreed pouches were emerging as a key player in the next generation of nicotine products.
Cawley said: “Nicotine pouches over the last couple of years have gone from strength to strength with us. We are changing our epos system and have introduced a nicotine pouches sub category so we can separate it out.”
Cawley maintained that despite the forthcoming changes “vape is here to stay”. At its peak the category represented 11.5% to 12% of Park Garage Group’s shop sales. This figure took a hit with the disposable ban coming in last June, when it fell to around 6.5% to 7% with it hard to get hold of stock of alternative top sellers, but it has now increased to over 9%. “I think we probably over-indexed pre ban,” said Cawley.
“If we can normalise it at around 9-10% I would be happy for the next four or five years.”
