Planning the Format Exit: The Portfolio Programme Behind the List

The exit programme has four movements. Inventory: every listed format in the portfolio, with volumes, revenue, tooling, contract and customer exposure, per listing and per market (the national layer included). Decide: per line, redesign to an alternative, convert to a service model, rely on an evidenced qualification, or exit the line - with the alternatives assessed by the five-question method, not by hope. Sequence: conversions mapped onto the calendars that actually gate them - tooling and packer conversions, artwork cycles, retail range reviews, refit programmes - so each line converts at a planned changeover. Run out: stock, printed materials and contracts wound down so the last lawful placing is a managed event.

This closing guide runs the programme with its dates.

The inventory is a data exercise on the reporting pipeline's estate - listed formats are identified from the packaging master data by format family, then enriched commercially (revenue, margin, strategic role) and technically (tooling age, line compatibility, conversion cost). The decision per line is a small business case with the assessment guide's five questions inside it, taken by the team that owns the line's P&L - because a conversion decided by compliance alone will be relitigated by the business at the first difficult quarter, and a conversion owned by the business survives. Record decisions with their review triggers: an exit decided for a format whose alternative improves may deserve reopening; a redesign committed should not drift.

The gating calendars in most estates: packaging line and packer conversion capacity (the industry's shared bottleneck into 2029 - book slots as decisions land); artwork and print cycles (conversions ride scheduled redesigns where possible); retail range reviews (own-brand and branded listings reset on the trade's calendar, and a format conversion that misses the review waits a year in the wrong format); HORECA refit programmes; and contract renewals with packers and co-manufacturers, where conversion costs are allocated. Sequence by constraint, not by listing order: the line whose packer slot exists in 2027 converts in 2027, whatever the annex's numbering says.

Run-out is where programmes leak: film stock, printed sleeves, portion-pack inventories and hotel amenity contracts all have tails that extend past their decisions. Set per line a last-order date for listed materials, a stock ceiling curve, and a disposition plan for the residue (lawful channels, return to supplier, write-off priced in advance). Close the programme with a readiness audit in the second half of 2029: every line's status evidenced (converted, qualified, exited), every market's position checked against the matrix, every stock tail measured against its ceiling - run early enough that its findings are a work list, not an obituary. The audit report is the programme's declaration moment: the point where the business states, to itself first, that the list has been met.

Close the station where the programme closes: with the exit as a story the business can tell truthfully - formats retired on evidence, alternatives assessed rather than assumed, service models built where hands were the better technology, qualifications claimed narrowly and proven. That story, documented in the programme's files, is worth more than its compliance value: it is the answer, pre-written, to the customers, journalists and authorities who will ask what the business did about the list, and it is the template the next list will be met with. Programmes end; the capability and the story remain on the balance sheet.

The programme needs an owner with the whole list in one head and a steering rhythm that matches its long fuse: quarterly reviews against the sequence plan, decisions escalated while they are still choices, the bottleneck calendars (tooling, refits, range reviews) re-forecast at each review because they are shared with every competitor's identical programme. Report the programme in the units the business steers by - lines converted of lines listed, stock exposure remaining, slots booked against slots needed - rather than in legal summaries. A five-year programme reported quarterly in operational units survives leadership changes; one reported annually in legal prose is rediscovered, expensively, by each new leadership in turn.