A founder emailed me last week asking how to get into Asda. My reply got long. Embarrassingly long, three screens on my phone by the time I checked it before sending, and since I keep typing versions of that same email to different people every few months, I've decided to tidy it up once and put it here, so next time somebody asks I can send a link and go and make a cup of tea.
Quick word on who's telling you this, so you can decide how much weight to give it. I co-founded LoveRaw and took it into 13,000 stores across 25 countries, and I pitched Asda in those years, a meeting room in Leeds, and the thing I remember about it isn't the outcome, it's the speed. I'd prepared this lovely brand story. Origin, mission, why we existed, the slides I was proudest of. It got a minute, maybe. Possibly less. Then we were into cost price and volumes and what the shopper pays, and that was essentially the whole meeting, and I came out annoyed, because it felt brusque, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that it wasn't rudeness. It was the job. Once you understand the job you can stop being offended by it and start being useful to it, which is really what this whole post is about.
Right, Asda in 2026 specifically. The year matters more than people realise.
The place is mid-rescue, is the short version. TDR Capital own most of it these days, Walmart kept a slice rather than walking away entirely, and at the end of 2024 they brought Allan Leighton back as executive chairman. Same Leighton who ran the place in the late 1990s. When a business goes and fetches the man from its good years, that tells you something on its own, I think. And what's he actually doing with it? Nothing clever, which I mean as a compliment. No repositioning, no new brand platform, none of the things a strategy consultancy would have charged them for. Just the oldest trick Asda has, which is being the cheapest full-range supermarket in the country again. Rollback came back at the start of 2025, and when a line goes through it the average cut is around 22%, so call it a fifth off the shelf price, near enough, which is not a trim. The stated plan is the whole range at what they're calling Asda Price by the end of 2026.
That's the weather your buyer wakes up to.
And here's the bit that actually affects you, the bit most founders skate straight past because it's uncomfortable. The range is shrinking while all this goes on. Leighton's version, roughly: we've got 30,000 lines and we want 24,000 to 25,000. They've been working through the shelf ever since, category by category, hunting duplication, and I'd sit with what that means for a second before writing a word of a deck. You are not being added to anything. Somebody else's product is coming off the shelf and yours is going into the hole it leaves, or you're not going in at all. The first time I thought that through properly I found it genuinely depressing, and now I think it's the most useful sentence in the whole post, because it tells you what your deck actually is. Not a brand presentation. An argument about which line in the bay is a duplicate, and why Asda ends up better off after the swap, once you count the margin and the rate of sale and what the shopper leaves the store with.
What does the buyer care about, then. Value, and honestly I'm tempted to leave the answer there. Asda's shopper is the most price-led of the big four, Aldi keeps nicking past them in the monthly share figures, which stings inside that business in a way outsiders underestimate, and the company has publicly staked the entire rescue on being cheapest. So your sustainability story, which is probably real, and I say this with some love, nobody in that room has time for it. Two lines on the founder journey, maximum. I've sat in rooms where a founder spent eight slides on the origin story in front of a buyer whose whole year is measured in price position, and you could feel the temperature dropping while they talked, and the worst part is they never noticed.
Supply is the other thing. I underestimated it myself, badly, so I'll spare you the same mistake. Asda is a shade over 1,100 sites now, though a good five hundred of those are the little Asda Express convenience shops that have sprouted everywhere, so the real volume lives in the superstores, and if a listing goes well it will lean on your production harder than anything in your company's life has leaned on it before. Leighton has a stated availability target of 98.5%. A small brand that shorts its first orders has just confirmed everything a big-four buyer already quietly suspected about small brands, and that reputation travels between categories faster than you'd believe, buyers talk to each other, they sit in the same office. So don't wait to be asked. Put the capacity plan on a slide. The second production line, the co-packer you've been talking to, whatever your honest answer is, show it before the question comes.
Oh, and rehearse this one at home, out loud, ideally to someone who'll laugh at you: if they Rollback your line eighteen months in and a fifth comes off the shelf price, who funds that? I've watched founders freeze on much gentler questions. You don't need a perfect answer. A rough honest one beats a silence by miles.
Which leaves the question the founder actually emailed me about, which is how you get in front of a buyer in the first place. There's a genuine front door now, and you could not have said that about a big-four grocer ten years ago. Asda were the first of the big four onto RangeMe, the platform where you upload your range and it gets matched to the right category buyer, and if a buyer likes what they see, they come back to you through it. No agency retainer, no guessing someone's email format off LinkedIn at eleven at night. Would I rely on it alone? No. Work the warm routes as well, trade shows, distributors already delivering into Asda depots, anybody who drinks coffee with the category team. But the cold route genuinely functions, which still slightly surprises me whenever I say it out loud. And if someone does bite, there's onboarding before a single case ships, supplier numbers, systems, depot paperwork, weeks of it, so plan for weeks and be pleasantly surprised if it's less.
Last thing, and I'd honestly do this before any of the above. Walk a big Asda with a notebook. Price up your whole bay, own label, the brand leader, the Rollback tags, all of it, and make yourself answer the horrible question: which product here comes out so mine can go in, and why is Asda better off after the swap. I still do a version of this walk out of habit, in shops I have no business walking. Every buyer in that business is hunting duplication right now anyway, so walk in with the argument already built and you've done a chunk of their job for them, and buyers remember the people who do that. They really do. I've written before about why one deck fails across different retailers, and Asda punishes a generic deck faster than most, because a generic deck is, almost by definition, not an argument about their bay.
As for the deck itself, DeckSmith will build the Asda version from your own numbers, in the order this buyer reads. Price, margin, volume, story. At Asda the order is most of the battle. Decks built that way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales, which I mention only because the deck is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of a brand, and founders tend to treat it as the last job rather than the first impression it actually is. Decks built that way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales, which I mention only because the deck is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of a brand, and founders tend to treat it as the last job rather than the first impression it actually is.
