The Very Good Food Company (VERY.C) doubles up on distribution with Horizon Grocery + Wellness

The Very Good Food Company (VERY.C) leveraged its new partnership with Horizon Grocery + Wellness to sign on with Canadian grocery chain, Save-On Foods, to carry their The Very Good Butchers products in 184 of their stores across Canada.

This may seem like stating the blatantly obvious, but if you want to be successful with a niche industry like alternative meat, you need to get it into the big chain stores. In this case, Save-On Foods, the big yellow sign on every street corner with B.C.’s own billionaire proprietor, Jim Pattison, signing the cheques, accomplishes that for VERY.

“The expanded retail distribution in Canada is a direct result of us meeting our goals to ramp up production at our facilities in order to meet consumer demand and support our revenue growth. We set our sights on Save-On-Foods at the beginning of 2020 and now we have finally achieved this milestone. We are thrilled that our products will be carried by Canada’s largest Western-based grocery retailer due largely in part to our successful partnership with Horizon. With these new relationships, our products are now accessible coast-to-coast across Canada,” said Mitchell Scott, co-founder & CEO of The Very Good Food Company.

Horizon is a distributor of organic and natural foods, natural personal care items and nutritional supplements based in Western Canada. They’re a more than adequate addition to VERY’s North American wholesaler, eCommerce and food service network, primarily because of the options and doorways they provide.

The global meat market right now is worth about $20.7 billion and will expand to around $23.2 billion by 2024, according to market research company, Euromonitor. The growth is coming from concerns surrounding animal welfare, food security and the pandemic. But it’s also about availability and visibility. There are simply more products on the market than before, and more are coming out every year. The simple fact of being able to see them in the frozen food section in one of the country’s largest grocers will mean a substantial bump in revenue.

Save-on-Foods also owns several well established banners, including PriceSmart Foods, Urban Fare and Bulkey Valley Wholesale. The five SKU’s that will be showing up on shelves from The Very Good Butcher are The Very Good Burger, Smokin’ Bangers, Taco Stuff’er, Very Good Pepperoni and the Very Good Dog. They’ll be available in all 177 of its retail stores and seven Urban Fare locations on August 1, 2021, and bump their overall distribution for The Very Good Butcher’s products to 573 stores.