ry administration with a network of 23 stores. Collins’ brief rapidly became a turnaround job, helping work out which parts of the business could survive and then rebuilding what remained. Flannerys had already lived several retail lives by then. Founded in 1973 by Mal and Berice Flannery in the Tweed/Gold Coast region, when organic food occupied a decidedly eccentric corner of Australian grocery, the business had spent decades watching its vocabulary migrate into the mainstream. Probiotics, bone broth, organic produce and plant-based foods, once pariahs in big retail, now occupy valuable supermarket real estate. “It would have been very, very much on the fringe of what people were looking for,” Collins said of those early years. “But it’s amazing how, like, 50 years is a long time…That sort of health and wellness is very much front and centre.” The Natural Grocery Company acquired the business in 2016, then encountered the financial difficulties that brought Collins through the door. The predicament he inherited went well beyond a disappointing trading period. Administrator Timothy Cook was appointed on November 25, 2019, and during the administration, six stores were closed while 16 continued trading. Creditors subsequently backed a Deed of Company Arrangement that required court approval to transfer the company’s shares to Myahlo Pty Ltd as trustee for the Natural Grocery Company Trust. The Federal Court found winding up was the only viable alternative and that creditors would fare worse under liquidation. Collins remembers the operational aftermath. “We came out in early February 2020, and then [Covid-19] hit. We ended up with 10 stores, and it was not profitable. But by July 2020, we finally made the first profit – and have grown from there.” Collins, who was previously CEO of Supermarkets and Liquor for Metcash, brought supermarket habits into a business whose stores could feel, in his description, like the traditional health-food shop – shelves of worthy products arranged with limited regard for how ordinary people navigate a grocery run. Lismore’s Fundies Wholefood Market shop became the prototype. Collins wanted produce at the entrance, then refrigeration, dairy and freezer space, with categories situated in a coherent sequence. A store of about 250sqm that had carried roughly four refrigerator doors and two freezer doors was expanded substantially. “I wanted to flow like a supermarket,” he said. A record-breaking flood Flannerys had renovated the Fundies store before the catastrophic February 2022 flood, when the Wilsons River reached a record 14.4 metres. Staff followed the old flood plan and moved food to the mezzanine, above the historic high-water marks. At about 1am on February 28, Collins received a photograph showing water already above the ground floor. “It had never been seen before,” he recounted. The company kept employees on the payroll during the closure and continued paying rent while the landlord was under pressure, then rebuilt the store again. Collins now describes Lismore as a strong performer. An appetite for novelty The commercial logic of the Flannerys revival depended on understanding an unusually inquisitive shopper. Collins remembers customers arriving for eggs, flour or frozen food and then asking staff a question rarely heard with such enthusiasm in a conventional supermarket: “What else is new?” At first, he assumed it was an aberration but store teams told him otherwise. The appetite for novelty gave Flannerys licence to move early on emerging categories, while Collins also pushed the business towards the most prosaic staples. “We’ve got to be selling bread, milk, and eggs – basic stuff,” he told the team. His broader retail maxim is equally plain: “Give the customer what they’re looking for and charge them a reasonable price for it, and they keep coming.” The combination of an adventurous wellness shopper and ordinary weekly necessities helps explain the modern Flannerys proposition. The stores sell fresh organic produce, bulk pantry goods, dairy, frozen food, supplements, skincare and household products, with qualified naturopaths available in every location. Collins regards the latter as central to the model. A shopper arriving with a vague instruction to buy magnesium, for example, can find several formulations with different intended uses. “I think having that sort of knowledge base in the stores is very important to us, and to our customers,” he said. Complementary medicines make up an industry worth about $6.3 billion a year, industry body Complementary Medicines Australia has reported, so it makes perfect sense that offering advice gives a specialist retailer a useful defence against pharmacies, supermarkets and online sellers competing on range and price. Two stores a year Flannerys Neutral Bay opened this year, extending a Sydney presence that began with Mona Vale in 2017, while Samford Village west of Brisbane is scheduled to open in October. Flannerys worked with a Victorian consultancy firm to analyse the demographics of its network and also to identify target areas across the East Coast. Neutral Bay and its surroundings proffered a particularly interesting case study. Australia’s 2021 Census data disclosed the area’s median household income was $2443 a week, while 56 per cent of residents aged 15 and over hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. It is a privileged catchment with the spending power to make organic produce, premium supplements, and specialist advice part of an ordinary basket. Collins puts the ideal Flannerys footprint at about 350 to 450sqm, a size that can be awkward to secure in Sydney at a rent the economics will tolerate. He spent three years finding a replacement site around the corner from the original Miami store on the Gold Coast. That sort of patience is crucial, as the model depends on carrying produce, bulk food, vitamins, naturopaths and a complete pantry offer under one roof. A compromised box weakens the proposition and also reveals how far the business has travelled from the health-food-store stereotype. The network is now at 13 stores, with Samford taking it to 14, and Collins expects another two to three stores over the next couple of years. He can imagine 50 sites eventually operating along the East Coast, before e-commerce is fully exploited. He made a striking claim that network sales have doubled since FY20 and that the business is profitable, with earnings being reinvested in stores. The physical evidence is visible: Almost every store has been refitted, the estate is growing again and a company that once shed stores to survive is back hunting for them. Circularity to the story Collins arrived from mainstream grocery without any grand plan to stay and applied his disciplines to a retailer founded when organic food was distinctly unconventional. Now, half a century later, mainstream grocery is busy borrowing the categories that once made Flannerys peculiar. The advantage now has to come from execution, curation and expertise, because bone broth and probiotics no longer belong to specialists alone. Collins appears comfortable with that contest. “Ultimately, the customers will tell you whether or not you’re getting it right,” he noted. Flannerys survived administration, a pandemic and the destruction of a freshly renovated store in one of Australia’s worst floods. A three-day diagnosis has become a seven-year tenure. Career pivots have begun on flimsier premises. Originally published in the October edition of Inside FMCG.