Grocerant niche Holiday Meal Sales Planning Starts Now

 

Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® recent presentation “Falling Forward” outline when and how restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, and new non-traditional food retailers should think about building Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat sales through the fall and holiday season.

With football games, basketball games, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas on the way and with new limitations on large event gatherings and justified concerns over sharing food in public spaces. Johnson, stated grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared meals and meal components that can complement the ‘event’ or family gathering will be in greater demand this year than ever before.  Here is some of what we know Digital ordering and delivery has grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic since 2014

 

1.       Our new 2021 Grocerant ScoreCards found 82.3% of consumers don’t know what’s for dinner at Noon, and 61.1 don’t know what’ s for dinner at 4PM %.

2.       83.1% all dinners have at least 1 grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat meal component and 68.4% have two meal components.

3.       When asked if they wanted to cook dinner from scratch or assemble dinner from fresh meal components 90.4 % of Gen Z chose assemble from Fresh Prepared Meal Components and Millennials 82.7% chose meal components.

4.       Seventy-three percent of retail prepared food purchases are taken to go

5.       Prepared food purchases are frequently a planned purchase among 59% of shoppers, while 41% of shoppers said they buy prepared foods on impulse. Dinner has the highest amount of prepared food buys with 79% of respondents making purchases for that meal, while lunch comes in at 77% and breakfast at 62%.

6.       55% of consumers would like to try autonomous EV delivery

That said, how and where are you preparing to sell food this fall? Most consumers lack the skill-set to prepared everything from wings, pizza, fried chicken, or holiday sides with the regional or family flavors ‘grandma’ was so good at preparing and no one else in the family learned how to cook.   

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Friends, family, and colleagues still want to celebrate as they did before, but do not have the time to spend cooking a special meal not to mention once again the skill-set to do it. Gen Z and Millennials in search of food discovery are driving adoption of new avenues of distribution so that they can recreate convenient meal participation, differentiation and individualization they have become accustom to with spending the time doing it. To that end we would like to introduce you to Freshop.  

So,Freshop is a eCommerce platform, where you can showcase your brands craveable meals, and meal components as a solution, while you re-engage your kitchen services team and meet the new customer demands created by the pandemic.

1. Holiday Meals
   Create customized meals specific to the holiday season and the size of the gathering. Offer full meals or your signature sides to enhance any table during your customers’ holiday celebrations.
    
2. Bundled Meals
   Include a limited daily menu of complete meals on your website so customers can add them to a regular shopping order. This brings convenience to the customer by eliminating an extra stop for takeout orders at a secondary location.
    
3. Catering for Business Events and Parties
   It’s a great time to take that tri-fold brochure and add those signature items to your website. Creating an updated menu of your catering items on your site allows your customers to plan ahead for their event on their terms and time schedule by creating a separate event and party shopping list.
    
4. Cakes
   The party must (and will) go on. It may be smaller, but offering cakes continues activity in the bakery area while providing your customers with a personalized focal point for their party.

We that even less than a year ago for most of you, adding catering, cakes, and prepared meal options to your website would have been considered an aspirational luxury. It has now become an incredible opportunity to increase online sales and differentiate one’s business while providing better service for customers. It can also prepare your store for what is to come in the post-pandemic era for the grocery business.

Freshop has built the ability to add and manage these products into its online grocery shopping platform. We ask you once again where are you selling your meals and meal components?

Don’t over reach. Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing ideations look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Interested in learning how Foodservice Solutions® can edify your retail food brand while creating a platform for consumer convenient meal participation, differentiation and individualization?  Email us at: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or visit us on our social media sites by clicking the following links: Facebook,  LinkedIn, or Twitter