Actions Speak Louder Than Words

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

That we must respond to our consumers is beyond doubt — but to which consumer shall we respond? The hypothetical consumer answering survey questions? Or the actual consumer purchasing in our stores?

If you listened to the retailers who spoke at the Fresh Summit workshop president Bryan Silbermann refers to — Don Harris from Wild Oats/Whole Foods, Mike O’Brien from Schnucks Markets and Michael Agostini from Wal-Mart — you constantly got the sense they felt they knew their customers better than the customers knew themselves.

In a sense, they probably do; they have decades of experience judging behavior, and behavior informs us in a way words do not.

What are we to make of 73 percent of consumers saying they are “very concerned” about pesticide residues? How are we to understand 50 percent are “very concerned” about “germs” on the produce?

To a retailer, the key question is how to interpret “very concerned.” If 73 percent of consumers are “very concerned” about pesticides but “very concerned” does not translate into skipping the produce department or reducing produce purchases, maybe it is not something to be too worried about.

Retailers and producers make a mistake if they dismiss self-reported consumer concerns discordant with past behavior. Sometimes consumer expressions can signal a shift from past concerns that will be reflected in future behavior. Sometimes self-reported consumer sentiments can reveal a marketing opportunity just waiting for someone to seize.

Interpreting consumer research requires important attention to the meaning of words. If consumers report “locally grown” foods are safer than produce transported long distances, what are they saying? That transportation makes produce unsafe? Those growers, who know their product needs to be transported, do things that make it less safe? Or is it “us vs. them,” where “local” growers are somehow “like” the consumers whereas distant growers are not and thus distrusted?

We certainly should not assume consumer perceptions correspond to trade practices. Locally grown is an excellent example. Many chains have rules that local is based on mileage. For example, on its Web site, Whole Foods gives its criteria for local: Only produce that has traveled less than a day (seven or fewer hours by car or truck) from the farm to our facility can be labeled “locally grown.”

Seven hours at 65 miles per hour is 455 miles. Also, this is the distance to a Whole Foods “facility,” not the store. If the facility is three hours from the store, produce grown 650 miles from the store could still be classified as local. That is almost the distance between Baltimore, MD, and Jacksonville, FL.

If consumers report they love local and we judge the veracity of this statement by putting produce from several states away in front of them, their behavior won’t correspond to their statements because they likely meant something entirely different by “local.”

In its own research on this topic, Produce Business is finding issues such as nationalism can wildly affect consumer attitudes. In the United Kingdom, for example, residents of London, who might wax poetic over local in a focus group, are horrified if the moderator tries to explain they might like more produce imported from northern France. Although it is 840 miles from Land’s End in Cornwall to John O’Groats in Caithness, this voyage is considered local while a mere 22-mile boat trip across the English Channel is not.

Countless U.S. studies have confirmed the same point: rarely do consumers consider out-of-state produce locally grown.

Sometimes, retailers know that, in a practical sense, something consumers may value never happens in their markets. So consumers, who really want to know where their food comes from, may be out of reach for a supermarket as those consumers may turn to alternative sources, such as farmer’s markets or the various subscription box initiatives.

Supermarkets may put up signs or a Web site with farmer info, but those are just names and pictures, and not all consumers trust the information. It is a very different experience from meeting John the farmer every Saturday at a local farmer’s market or driving to the country to pick up a box of produce on the farm where it was grown.

It is very difficult to do a controlled experiment on consumer attitudes, so we always need be cautious in assuming we know why consumers feel as they do.

Perhaps food safety drives their thoughts or perhaps they picked up a shifting zeitgeist in which reducing food miles is thought to be virtuous and reduce global warming.

We discussed the study Produce Business is doing — with the generous support of a grant from Stemilt Growers — last month in my Fruits of Thought column titled Locale Not Local. That piece is in great harmony with Bryan’s thoughts that what consumers really want may not be local as much as it a series of factual things — including perhaps food safety — that they associate with local.

If true, this points the way to a marketing strategy for national marketers to emphasize the authenticity of their production locales and the experience and integrity of the farmers who grow the produce.

Ed McLaughlin of Cornell University, who this writer also counts as a friend and longtime collaborator, might be smiling ever so slightly at this controversy. The good professor is certainly the first to recognize good research almost always suggests more questions than it provides answers.

This keeps life interesting and ensures there is always research to be done and columns to be written.