Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/769179
seeing a few pioneers in rooftop, hydroponic and aeroponic farming. These methods are still pretty expensive right now, and difficult to proliferate. They are somewhat in the phase where cellphones were in the mid-1980s: kind of expensive, clunky, and sort of a luxury item. But the whole composition of how to produce on-site is rooted in technologies where things typically are going to get cheaper across time. There are now more places and ways consumers can buy specialty foods. How can retailers compete with this proliferation of new competitors? Brick-and-mortar stores have to get back into the whole feelings game. They need to use their real estate as a place where people can be educated and inspired. Their success over the next decade is pegged against the extent to which they can do that. Right now, most grocery stores are just, by and large, pipelines for food. The customer isn't having any sort of experience. With their smart phone, people can order commodities cheaper, faster, better, and more conveniently, so why would they go to a grocery store? It leaves the retailer at this point of saying, 'How do we create an experience for people? How do we connect people to the story of their food, because we know they want that?' Retailers have been working to create a more farmers market-like experience, where you feel like you can hold the whole supply chain in your hand. Grocery stores can't do that at scale too easily. Using tele-presence technology as an interaction layer inside a grocery store is something that they can use to address this need, but grocery stores haven't had the will to do it yet. Our company created a prototype for Baldor Food, the large produce distributor; they have all these interesting relationships with farmers but aren't in a position to ever touch the customer. We created a life-size, two-way video so customers can have live conversations with the person who grew the vegetables, a nutritionist, or a chef. People were walking up to this thing and with a giant Hubbard squash in their hands, asking, "What is this, and what do I do with it?" Really simple interactions like that. Other stores, like the Whole Foods Market in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, while not doing the whole video thing yet, has created a separate ordering mechanism, Forager, to allow custom- ers to order from a deeper catalog of products, not just what they have real estate to stock in store. It's a baby step, but is an example of how the retail space can be a portal for other expe- riences. It's a nice blend of being like Amazon, but with a physical retail presence. A few retailers, such as Whole Foods Market, Kroger, and Wegmans have played lead- ing roles in identifying and cultivating new specialty food products. Do you see this trend spreading out to more main- stream retailers? I would put money on the fact that in 10 years every retailer will have some sort of vehicle to identify and cultivate new start- ups. Whole Foods Market and Kroger are doing it; it's happening in other stores with their private-label teams. All retailers are basically looking at these start-ups as the first people to meet emerging needs; they are so much more in touch with the evolving customer. Stores have the real estate and ability to test these people, to give more retail space to products that have not yet proven them- selves in the marketplace, which synchs up with grocery stores needing to create more excitement. Consumers want to discover things that are new and interesting. It's that Apple store feeling. One thing we'll see by 2027 is stores creating test-and-learn corners, which are great vehicles to vet a lot of these startup companies. As a retailer, in a year you talk to a thousand different small brands, and maybe you pick 150 new brands to test out. With a test-and-learn corner, you get actual hard data, showing which 20 were the ones to really take off. That's the begin- ning of decoupling of a very slow cyclical shelf reset schedule that is the oxygen of the food industry. There are some great creative ideas that don't synch up with that cycle. Smaller ideas just need a little more cultiva- tion, and a little more room to breathe. Retailers will sell more produce they grow themselves. 40 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE specialtyfood.com