Woodbury, Minn.-based Kowalski’s Markets is in the middle of a three-week, total-store contest featuring mangoes, and so far the results have been excellent.
“This was just a great opportunity to kind of push it and see how fun and creative all the department managers and all the different departments in the stores could get to really drive some extra mango awareness and mango sales,” said produce director Max Maddaus.
The items on sale have been jumbo mangoes, honey mangoes, conventional and organic 15-ounce packs of mango slices, and a “Mango Tango” cut fruit blend.
Beyond the produce section, departments across the stores have incorporated mango into a slew of items prepared on location: mango cheesecake, mango tarts, mango puff pastries, mango salsa, chipotle lime marinated chicken and mango kebab, mango pork tenderloin roulade and more.
“Sales on mangoes have been phenomenal the last week,” Maddaus said April 30. “All the stakeholders in all the stores have really done a great job promoting mangoes and creating fun, energetic displays for customers to grab from.
“They’re getting creative and trying to push mangoes into every corner of the stores,” Maddaus said.
He said that produce managers took the contest opportunity into their weekly store-level merchandising meetings with the managers of other departments and collaborated on how to make mangoes prominent throughout the stores. Each produce manager also worked with his or her team to pick everyone’s brain for ways to make the promotion fun.
“We’ve got a lot of really talented people that work in our stores that have a lot of great, exciting ideas,” Maddaus said.
The National Mango Board provided promotional funding to support the contest.