An Opportunity Not To Be Missed
By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business
Certain behaviors are closely correlated to age. Want to be a Public Policy genius? Find a cohort of children much larger than the current generation of teenagers and young adults and declare that violent crime will increase over the next 20 years. Want to be a genius twice? As this large generation hits 40, confirm that the generation behind is much smaller, then announce that violent crime will decline over the next 20 years.
So the produce industry may well get in trouble as it looks over the next few decades and sees rising per-capita consumption, which is actually caused not by the increased popularity of fresh produce, but by the age curve of consumers. We may declare ourselves geniuses for our marketing acumen and be totally shocked when consumption starts to drop as the high-consuming age cohort begins to be superseded by much smaller numbers.
Whatever people consume, it is not hard to come up with reasons why produce quality, variety, and price would compel shopper visits. Grocery items are interchangeable, so it is difficult to drive traffic with your spiffy display of Tide. Yet it is also true that one shouldn’t overplay the meaning of surveys such as this. Things that tend to win the acclaim of large numbers of shoppers also tend to quickly be focused on by most chains. So they become not so much a winning strategy as the ante necessary to play in the game. There are, of course, differences between banners in their emphasis on fresh produce, and thus, on the quality and variety available and even on the price, but if you compare, well, apples to apples, say two upscale chain stores of around the same square footage serving similar demographics in the same neighborhood, typically, one finds pretty similar produce departments.
So the consumer winds up getting attracted by offerings that seemingly are of low importance on surveys. In other words, if cleanliness is important to 98 percent of shoppers, and as a result, all the stores focus on cleanliness, then it might be the selling of Kosher food or organic food, though important to only a tiny percentage of consumers, which actually drives store choice.
The role of produce in attracting shoppers from one store to another is interesting. In urban areas, there has been an explosion of ethnic retailers. These retailers succeed in no small part because of their razor-sharp focus on a particular consumer, specifically consumers of a particular nationality or ethnicity. This focus tends to edit grocery assortment severely, so most shoppers won’t be satisfied by these stores — they don’t carry the brand of pasta sauce or soup the mainstream consumer seeks.
However, although some of these stores add some produce items, say carrying more chilis or peppers, they typically offer a robust produce selection. In fact, because these ethnic stores are quick on the dime and opportunistic buyers, they often can offer very good produce for truly bargain prices. So the produce selection serves as an independent draw for mainstream consumers.
Marketing and merchandising, as Churchill said of Russia in another context, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. So if one must choose, it is not completely clear whether it is wiser to merchandise with the main-plate protein because side dishes are customary there, or to merchandise with the sandwich and burger fixings to push the idea that produce can enhance these items. Of course, the real winner is when one can introduce consumers to meal alternatives where produce takes center stage — say a stir-fry, where the protein is more an accent and the produce is the star.
There are, indeed, lots of opportunities to sell snack fruit to children. A not insignificant part of the boom in Mandarins is that they are such a perfect fruit for children. Being small, the Mandarins fit in the hands of a child; they are seedless, sweet, easy-to-peel, really a perfect storm of snack fruit for a child. Add in the role of fresh-cuts, where things such as watermelon spears and cubes have transformed a relative rare summertime specialty into an everyday dish in refrigerators across the country.
Of course, if we really want to train children to eat healthily, we have to condition their taste buds to appreciate more bitter vegetables. That is a tough sell, but the good news is that with all the Baby Boomers around, all suddenly mindful of their mortality, displays, and information supporting the health benefits of vegetables of all types have an appreciative constituency ready and waiting. That is an opportunity to boost sales, please customers and help the health of American consuming public — in other words, an opportunity not to be missed.