MARCH 2009
Meal-Planning Center Provides
Incremental Sales Opportunities
By John Karolefski
What’s for dinner?
Whether meal planning takes place in the aisle or at home, simply coming up with what to prepare for dinner each night can be a stressful challenge. Most shoppers have a basic routine consisting of four or five center-plate items prepared three or four different ways, with the average shopper preparing the same recipe four times a month.
Boring? Yes, but it saves time – both in preparation and in shopping. There’s less stress and less risk.
“Most shoppers generally purchase the same items trip after trip because they follow the same meal regime week after week. They may switch brands, but the product mix is fairly consistent over time,” said Frank Beurskens, president of Buffalo, N.Y.-based ShoptoCook, provider of recipe content for supermarkets.
Not surprisingly, this typical behavior provides incremental sales opportunities for retailers and food makers.
For example, the supermarket could provide shoppers with alternative meal ideas to break their normal routine. In-store chef programs like Schnucks Cooks at Schnuck Markets in St. Louis do this by engaging shoppers with new ideas each week. But not every store can afford to have a full-time person preparing and engaging with shoppers.
“That is where technology can fill-in,” said Beurskens. “Interactive devices engage shoppers. A touch of a finger can provide ideas selected by the shopper, printed out with an ingredient list and aisle location.”
ShoptoCook Recipe Centers provide consumers with a unique opportunity to discover new and exciting meal solutions. Shoppers are engaged at the most influential point in their buying process. ShoptoCook solutions are installed in progressive supermarkets across the country, including Schnucks, Spartan, Bloom, Nash Finch, Tops Friendly Markets, Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, Brookshire’s, ACME and Associated Grocers of New England, and leading independents such as, Penn Dutch, Wellfleet, Clements, Al's, Parkview, and Giant Food Marts.
ShoptoCook Recipe Centers are typically located along the perishable perimeter in the supermarket’s meat, seafood, produce, wine or cheese departments where meal-planning takes place. The kiosks provide printed recipes, accompaniment ideas, information and recipes on a variety of health & wellness conditions such as diabetes and gluten free foods, as well as information on the preparation and storage of all fruits and vegetables.
ShoptoCook is the nation’s leading provider of interactive recipe content for grocery stores. ShoptoCook Answers™ includes thousands of recipe ideas associated with every item sold in the Fresh department and are designed to increase loyalty and incremental sales. Optional solutions, designed to make shopping easier, include integrated Item Locater maps, Ingredient Nutritional Scoring, Price Checker, Wine Pairing, and Health & Wellness modules. Solutions are available for in-store kiosks and digital signage, with the latest developed for service counter weigh scales and retailer web sites.
METTLER TOLEDO, in conjunction with ShoptoCook, has developed an integrated solution that helps shoppers conveniently get meal ideas. The solution is the next step in a growing suite of value-added, scale-based solutions that run seamlessly on an open-scale platform.
Meal Planner™, by METTLER TOLEDO, is a scale-based turn-key recipe solution offering instant access to thousands of professional meal solutions for nearly every cut of meat, seafood and produce item offered in grocery stores. Each professionally-written and tested recipe contains a mouth-watering color photo, “serve-with” suggestions, ingredient lists, and preparation instructions.
Schnuck Markets has enhanced its consumer web site with the same content found on the grocer’s popular Recipe Center. The online feature and in-store kiosk, both branded as Schnucks Cooks, enables shoppers to pre-shop from the comfort of their homes.
“The recipe plug-in at www.schnucks.com is the first component of a multi solution suite of applications under development that integrate seamlessly into our in-store interactive network,” said Beurskens.
How do retailers like Schnuck Markets benefit from the ShoptoCook solution?
“The bottom line is that recipes sell,” said Beurskens. “We recently concluded a three-month, chain-wide promotion. The Holiday Baking menu button featured seven branded ingredients in 25 unique recipes. Sales increased 3,900 units, or 18% versus control stores for just the 7 ingredients tracked. There were over 1,699 additional ingredients featured in printed recipes during the promotion.”
How do manufacturers benefit?
“Again, the bottom line is that recipes sell,” repeated Beurskens. “But manufacturers face additional challenges, like getting noticed. The GMA/Deloitte Shopper Marketing study found the average supermarket carries 45,000 SKUs. Some 32,624 new items were introduced in 2006. About 3,000 marketing messages reach the average consumer each day. The average shopper purchases about 200 unique items annually. The odds of getting a new ingredient into the shoppers cart are pretty low, especially if the shopper does not know how to use the item in their normal recipe routine.
“Solution selling positions a new product in the context of a solution the shopper is searching for,” he went on to say. “ShoptoCook works with leading manufacturers to promote new products in the context of a recipe. With more and more supermarkets promoting private label brands, it becomes even more important to get a branded ingredient in front of a shopper in the context of a recipe. Many shoppers are reluctant to replace branded items featured in recipes, particularly when the branded item is unique, or seasoned in a special way.”
ShoptoCook supplies retailers with an extensive database of over 5,000 recipes with high resolution color photos. Every printed recipe includes a convenient shopping list, complete preparation instructions, and an opportunity to include coupons, or promotional messages. Aisle location and maps are also included as an optional service, providing the exact location of every ingredient featured in the recipe, as well as a keyword search feature, capable of locating every item category in the store. No more lost sales as a result of not knowing where to find a specific item.
The Readers Digest Association (RDA) is ShoptoCook’s exclusive agent, working with food manufacturers and their agencies, to create and execute successful marketing campaigns built around meal solutions. RDA owns some of the most popular food-oriented magazines, including Every Day with Rachael Ray and Taste of Home. In addition, RDA owns Allrecipes.com which provides an enormous database of quality recipes for every occasion.
“Recipes are an excellent way to communicate with shoppers,” Beurskens summed up. “Our objective is to provide supermarkets with a single source for interactive customer service solutions in-store and on the web, seamlessly integrated and built around recipes. It solves fundamental shopper problems and increases sales for retailers and brands.”
FEBRUARY 2009
How to Boost CPG Brands by Optimizing Center Store
By John Karolefski
Much of the pizzazz in supermarkets for many years has come from the sights and smells of such departments as floral, produce and bakery. Some analysts have predicted a reduction in the size of the center store as retailers continue to place even more emphasis on the perimeter to maintain loyal shoppers and attract new ones.
That strategy may be changing soon. The turbulent economy continues to alter the eating and shopping habits of Americans. Consumers are eating out less and cooking more at home. That’s good news for makers of traditional food and beverage products.
So it’s not surprising to see more interest nowadays in optimizing the center store in the context of the total store.
“People may be cutting back on fresh flowers, but they’re not cutting back on making sure that there’s peanut butter on their table. In today’s marketplace, people are becoming much more attuned to what’s in the center of the store. That’s where all the staples are and that’s where the trade dollars are,” said Wes Bray, COO of Retail Optimization, Inc. (ROI) in West Haven, Conn. (www.retailoptimization.com).
“Retailers know that at some point it starts to cost them money to shrink the center of the store too far,” he continued, “but until recently they really haven’t had the ability to actually measure where that point is.”
Bray tells the story of a major grocery chain that enlisted support from eight of its vendors to fund the optimization of the center store. The work included determining the right size as well as analyzing adjacencies and traffic flow. One of the results of the collaboration was creating a total beverage aisle that includes everything from soft drinks and bottled water to coffee, tea and cocoa.
Bray’s company provided the software to conduct the analysis and make recommendations. He is ready to start working with a major chain in the Southeast. The two-store pilot is being funded by one of the larger food companies.
“There is definitely strong interest in collaborating with retailers {to optimize the center store},” he said.
There are two core elements to the software model:
- Finding Inefficiencies What products throughout the store are turning too slowly to justify their space? “You find yourself comparing coffee with frozen waffles with canned green beans,” said Bray. “That identifies all sorts of hidden inefficiencies or hidden efficiencies across the store and leads to out of stock reduction and reshaping of the categories in the store.”
- Creating Adjacencies What products do shoppers want grouped together in the store? “Adjacency work is still in its relative infancy because it involves asking consumers, ‘Do you want the mustard next to the ketchup or do you want the mustard next to the hot dogs?’ It’s a very qualitative science right now. We’re going see more categories defined by consumer use than by type of product,” he said.
ROI’s software aims to “right size” categories. By looking at the whole store as opposed to looking at – say – the coffee category, it takes the whole store and optimizes on the basis of several different types of data: average gross profit, velocity, consumer insight, shopper loyalty, and so forth.
“We look to optimize the entire store,” explained Bray. “Our work results directly in increased center store sales and profits.” Successful optimization has increased sales and profits by 5% to 7% and reduced out of stocks by 10% to 12%. “It’s making the center of the store the right size and making it more efficient. The adjacency work will increase sales even more.”
ROI’s solution is available as software as a service and essentially by subscription. ROI takes data from the retailer, cleanses it and feeds it automatically into the model. Optimization takes place on a store by store basis.
“Our Total Store Optimizer is a very data intensive, highly reliable and highly valid process,” said Bray. “It comes with an annual subscription and renews itself automatically. We have the data pipe flowing and it becomes a very valuable tool for them. In fact, it’s a real epiphany for retailers. They’re able to run their own ‘what if’ scenarios around it.”
For CPG companies, ROI offers a syndicated version of its model which allows them to essentially look outside their category for space opportunities for new products. So they can look in contiguous aisles and across categories that are in their aisle.
“It’s a much more automated version and it’s really targeted to help CPG manufacturers identify space that they may not have been able to identify before for new products,” he said.
One of the benefits for both retailers and manufacturers is the relatively low cost of restructuring of shelves, according to Bray.
“It’s a relatively modest expense to be able to trim back a category and expand another category a little bit and ripple throughout the store. It can be done in a relatively short period of time for a relatively low amount of money. We start seeing the impact right away,” he said.
Whether ROI solutions are for CPGs, retailers, or trading partners working in collaboration, here is the bottom line: there is a growing national consensus that the time is right for a revitalization of the center store. Using the right software solution is key to this renaissance.
