CHICAGO—Innovate, but don’t change yourself to appeal to the 1% of your customers.
Two retailers – Alfonso Cano, director of produce for Anaheim, Calif.-based Northgate Gonzalez Markets and Tom Williams, director of produce and floral at Coborn’s Inc., St. Cloud, Minn., joined Chuck Sample, vice president of Insights and Analytics, Rosemont, Ill., to talk about how they spot food trends.
The true growth is finding ways to get the customers happy with your store to buy more, they said.
“We ask what can we do to get that guest something that will make them come back,” Williams said. “What can we do to get that one extra item in everyone’s basket.”
Cano agreed.
“We’re looking for alternative items, the majority of items not heavily promoted,” he said. “You aren’t going to do it with lower prices on bananas and onions and tomatoes, you have to do with one of the other 600 items at the bottom that are not so competitively priced, like pushing a side stack of artichokes or asparagus with your tomatoes.”
Being a trend spotter
Retailers used to fear the Sunday paper, and the resulting onslaught of ingredient seekers, Williams said.
“It used to be all we had to worry about was what recipe was published in the Sunday paper,” he said. “Now, if it came out at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, we have to worry about having it at 4:01.”
But the good news is that social media makes it easy to spot what consumers are looking for, Cano said.
“I just hashtag produce and it’s all right there,” he said. “Trends are out there and you have to listen. Things like, Beyonce wore a kale shirt one day and the next day kale was everywhere.”
Williams says in-store people can be the best guide for what consumers want.
“We make a lot of in-store observations, especially people in the community who are not shopping with us,” he said. “As the demographics are changing in our country, there are a lot of voids out there. We have to ask ‘What are we missing that you would like us to carry?’”
But knowing the trends and making them profitable are two different things.
“You have to stay in your lane,” Cano said. “You can’t be everything to everyone. We don’t let the 1% of shoppers determine the 100%. We get a lot of inspiration from the produce people who work in the stores. They’re really plugged in.”
And, Cano and Williams said, every retailer has to put their special touch on something to make it resonate with consumers.
“One of the next big things is home meal and meal replacements,” Williams said. “But for us it’s not just a taco kit, but a “street taco kit with poblanos” and other ingredients that make it special.”