Highlights
- Observations on corn merchandising from produce retail veterans Armand Lobato, Mike O'Brien and Joe Watson.
- Corn merchandising inspiration from the Produce Artist Award Series.
Category deep dive
Check out the video above to enjoy some great category conversation with the industry expert panelists from our Produce Artist Award Series Spring 2021 Results webinar. Lobato's 40-year-plus retail career has spanned the produce manager, buyer, supervisor and other roles, and Watson and O'Brien both won Produce Retailer of the Year in their tenures as produce retail executives.
Key observations
- “Corn is such a tough one to maintain because it dries out so quickly,” Lobato said during the webinar. “It really needs to be done really nice and early in the morning, and it has to be maintained many times during the day. It's a challenge to keep it looking in nice … It takes a commitment to really do it and do it well so every wave of your traffic sees a good display.”
- Some shoppers like to shuck the ears right there in the store, but it makes a huge mess. Lobato noted that putting out trash cans can help. Watson said he actually discouraged stores from providing trash cans, however, because their presence seemed to encourage even more shoppers to break down the corn in the store.
- “(Corn) can be one of the most difficult items to be successful with if you do not have a good plan,” Watson said. “It has to be handled very, very carefully, and it has to be turned very, very quickly.”
- “Everybody loves the corn category,” O'Brien said. “It's a difficult category because it's not necessarily a real profitable category, especially when you get into hot promotion times. So the way to make money on corn is tray pack, tray pack, tray pack. Especially when you have corn promoted, you put a nice tray pack section by the bulk corn and generally that's where you make your money.”
- Aggressive merchandising is even more important when it comes to local product because the corn may not have been hydrocooled and so won't have as much shelf life. In that case, Watson said, you want to only bring in about a day or a day and a half of supply at a time so the product you're offering is fresh.
Display inspiration
If you're looking for even more beautiful sweet corn displays, check out this video of displays that have been submitted for our Produce Artist Award Series.