Friday, November 9, 2012

Food Channel Disruptions Continue to Garner Strength.



The skill-set and the desire to cook from scratch today is diminishing rapidly.  While food consumers are a highly fragmented group there are universal commonalities creating channel disruptions. Today it is all about the consumer buying the food they want prepared with the flavor profile of personal preference as mix and match meal components.

You can buy fresh prepared ready-2-eat  food from large format food retailers the ilk of  Safeway Lifestyle stores, Kroger’s Fred Meyer, Walmart Supercenters and, Whole Foods, or Smaller Format retailers like Trader Joe, Fresh & Easy (Tesco), Dollar Stores, Walgreens, and of course restaurants.
Restaurants are even more challenging in format proliferation. There is QSR, Fast Casual and Casual dining. But those lines are blurring as QSR goes upscale with McDonalds McCafe, Pret A Manger, artisan and take N bake pizza operators.
Not to be left out, Fast Casual Chain Panera Bread is adding drive thru’s along with Starbucks. Oh and Pizza Hut is recognizing the growing trend in sandwiches with their new ‘pizza wrap’ called P’Zolo. Now Starbucks is selling coffee via vending machines.
Tacoma, Washington based Foodservice Solutions® has been gathering retail food success clues since 1991.  Within the clues they discovered the universal commonalities from those commonalities they developed: The 5’P’s of Food Marketing:   Product,   Packaging,   Placement,   Portability, and Price which combined help explain the rapid expansion and success of the grocerant niche filled with ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat fresh and prepared food. 

Food Channel disruptions are occurring in large part because channel blurring is not in the mind’s eye of the consumer.  It is only in the mind’s eye of the legacy marketing managers in legacy companies. The explosive growth within the ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat fresh prepared food niche via new points of distribution is a perfect example of how the consumer is moving forward.  Retailers must meet the evolving consumer meal assembly need-set.

Interested in learning how the 5P’s of Food Marketing can edify your retail food brand while creating a platform for consumer convenient meal participationdifferentiation and individualization contact us via Email us at: grocerant@q.com or visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant or twitter.com/grocerant

No comments:

Post a Comment