Options abound in the apple category. How should a retailer go about choosing which of the many new varieties available to include in the assortment?
Don Roper, vice president of sales and marketing for Elgin, Minn.-based Wescott Agri Products, which offers premium varieties including Pazazz, RiverBelle and First Kiss, offered a few suggestions.
1. Pick a few favorites and stick with them.
“The retailer can’t just try to shotgun all new varieties out there,” Roper said. “They’ve really got to pick one, two or three of them to kind of get behind and say, okay, here are one or two varieties that we’re going to put that time and effort into … If you just try to do Apple of the Month or all these in-and-outs, it’s really hard for the consumer to start to develop an allegiance or a preference to that variety.”
Giving those varieties adequate time so that shoppers see them repeatedly and have plenty of opportunities to notice them and try them is another key component for new variety success, Roper noted.
“If you’re not going to give it four months’ or five months’ worth of time in a trial, then don’t spend a lot of time on it because you’ll have average sales at best,” he said.
2. Select your favorites based on what brings something different to your assortment.
“If you say, okay, I’m going to put on three new varieties, and they’re all big sweet new varieties, you really haven’t done your customer any favors,” Roper said. “You’ve got to kind of look at the apple category and say, ‘Okay, if I’m bringing in a new variety, where is that flavor profile? Is this one sweet? Is this one sweet-tart? Is this one tart? Is this one more of a different season?’”
Color and size could also be differentiators, Roper noted.
3. Be strategic in your pricing with the initial goal to encourage trial.
“If you go out and try to price it at a premium price of $3/pound of $3.99/pound, and it’s higher priced than say a Honeycrisp, which is really the bellwether out there, consumers might have a really hard time saying, ‘I’m going to pay more money for that apple’ when they don’t know it,” Roper said.
“Your pricing strategy should really be in place to drive trial as a retail partner – and that’s our job as supply partners to work with the retailers to get them to the price points that help them achieve their sales price that they want, the SRP they want, and the gross margin they need to attain or maintain as well," Roper said. "So you work with them hand in hand to figure out that pricing-margin strategy to go drive trial.
“Once you have good trial out there and you start to get allegiance with that apple, then you can work on improved pricing strategies as you move into the lifecycle, the growth lifecycle of that apple variety in the marketplace,” Roper said.