A family grocer in southern Portugal
Consumer & Retail · Southern Portugal
One shop, sixty kilometres of customers
Forty years in one town teaches you what sells. The hard part is the week you have not had yet.
The shop has served its town for more than forty years. It is a single store, but its delivery van covers a rural stretch of the western Algarve where the nearest alternative can be half an hour away.
That makes an empty shelf expensive in a way it never is in a city. It also makes over-ordering expensive: fresh fruit, vegetables and the butchery counter have days, not weeks, and the shop carries them on its own margin.
Demand that moves with the season and the sky
A single van, a rural catchment, and produce that will not wait. The order has to be right the first time.
The Algarve fills and empties. Visitor numbers swing through the year, a wet week changes what people cook, and the imported lines the shop is known for, the British and health-food brands its regulars come back for, cannot simply be reordered the next morning.
Working with NRY, the shop put three things it already knew into one model:
One list, not a guess
The result is not a dashboard. It is one order list each day, in the order it matters, built by the same people who run the tills, with the reasoning visible, so it can be overruled when they know something the model does not.