How to get your product into Coles

Start with three figures, because the buyer will. Trade spend, the rebates, promotional funding and co-op you pay the retailer out of your gross sales, commonly runs 10 to 25 percent in Australian FMCG. It is deducted before you are paid, and most founders meet their real number after signing trading terms rather than before.

Second, retailer margin. Depending on category, Australian retailers work on roughly 25 to 45 percent. Build a pricing waterfall, the line by line path from shelf price back through retailer margin, trade spend and freight to what actually reaches you per unit. If that last line is negative, a Coles listing makes the problem bigger, not smaller.

Third, your rate of sale, the units each store sells per week. A buyer holds shelf space that other products are already paying rent on. Your case has to show your product will out-earn whatever it displaces. That is an arithmetic argument, not a brand story.

Coles reviews each category on a calendar, in what the trade calls a range review, the periodic decision about which products stay, leave or join the shelf. Reviews for a given category run roughly every six months. Miss the window and you wait for the next one.

The mechanics are unglamorous. You submit a new line proposal through the retailer's supplier process, covering cost price, recommended retail price, promotional pricing, case configuration and the commercial case. If the buyer is interested, the invitation to present can arrive with about two weeks' notice. Two weeks is not enough time to build a trade spend model from scratch, which is why the work happens before the submission, not after the call.

Winning the review is the start. Holding the shelf is a supply chain exercise, and the requirements are non-negotiable.

EDI, electronic data interchange, the system that carries purchase orders and invoices between you and the retailer, must be accredited before production orders flow, and EDI builds take months, not weeks. You will also send ASNs, advance shipping notices that tell the distribution centre exactly what is coming before it arrives. Barcodes must be GS1 verified at unit, carton and pallet level. Stock moves on compliant pallets into fixed delivery windows.

The retailer measures you on DIFOT, delivered in full and on time, and it is the number your buyer checks before your story. Get the compliance wrong and chargebacks, the deductions retailers apply for non-compliant deliveries, typically run 1 to 5 percent of invoice value. That comes straight off margins that were already thin after trade spend.

Here is the part the excitement hides. After a ranging win, the first purchase order typically lands one to six months later. You fund production, packaging changes and compliance in that gap, before a dollar comes back.

Then the payment cycle starts. Trade spend is deducted before you are paid, and a large PO means a large working capital hole while you wait. The environment punishes optimism: 871 Australian retail businesses hit insolvency for the first time in FY25. A meaningful share of those failures were cash flow timing, not demand.

So model the cash curve of the PO you want, week by week, before you accept it. Sometimes the honest answer is a smaller ranging first, or not yet. It depends on numbers most founders have not modelled: your landed cost, your real trade spend rate, and how many weeks of cash the gap between production and payment consumes. Model those three before you pitch anyone.

Buyers read hundreds of submissions. The ones that survive share a structure: proof the product sells, arithmetic that works at retail prices, and evidence the supply chain will not embarrass anyone.

Your DTC data is an asset here. Repeat purchase rate, review volume and velocity per thousand customers translate into a rate of sale argument a buyer can defend internally. A planogram view, the diagram of how a shelf is laid out, showing where you fit and what you outperform, does more work than adjectives.

Concede the obvious first: nobody can promise you a Coles ranging. The buyer decides, every time, and any partner who guarantees shelf space is describing their marketing rather than the process. What you control is the quality of the case and the compliance behind it.

Our team has ranged four brands across Chemist Warehouse, Woolworths, Coles and Priceline as the agent, including Dr Pickles, on Woolworths and Coles shelves today. Past rangings never promise future ones. If you want the numbers modelled before you commit to anything, that is what the Retail-Readiness Sprint is for: a fixed fee of $15,000 for a single retailer scope, about four weeks, covering your real trade spend, pricing waterfall, review calendar and compliance gap list. You keep the model either way, and sometimes its answer is not yet. The Sprint is indicative and does not guarantee ranging.