Grocerant Meals, Snacks, Bundled Beverages are a Consumer Welcome Mat

 

Once again, the line between restaurants and food retailers is growing ever thinner. The fight for America's food dollars continues to intensify as consumers find fresh prepared Ready-2-Eat food options at a wide and growing array of outlets across almost every channel including convenience stores, chain drug stores, restaurants, grocery stores, club stores, vending and even more non-food traditional fresh food retailers like dollar stores.

While manufacturers, retailers, and restaurants worry about choice overload, consumers have embraced their new choices and show no signs of returning to the old ways. This fight is taking place in what is called the grocerant niche.

The restaurant industry is not known for trying to be the fastest to market with an ideation, food, or tech advance.  Restaurants are slowly understanding that the consumer never takes a step backwards from technology or fresh prepared food quality, speed of service, prepared food meal component options according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.  

In the United States, the larger the chain in almost all cases the more slowly they are to adopt something than a smaller chain or independent restaurants will. Chain restaurant’s goal is simple to feed one meal at a time in the restaurant while protecting and edifying the brand according to Johnson.

Historically chain restaurant leaders have denied the credibility of start-up competitors as non-relevant. The pizza sector is a great example; evolving from family dining independents to a national chain of "Red Roof" Italian, then to delivery-only outlets and now take-N-bake is garnering market share in the pizza sector.

Trends in the Food Industry Point to an Increase in Non-Traditional Meal Occasions

At the intersection of the consumer, freshly prepared food, and technology we find that consumer eating behavior is evolving and is now beyond the control of traditional food marketers.

Evolving culture and lifestyle, demographics along with the new uncertain economy are all putting pressure on the American food consumer: Demands of work, economic shrinkage, demands of raising a family, commuting, social interaction, kid's after-school activities, all contribute to a food marketplace where convenience vies with price over legacy brands.

Recent Advances in Food Packaging and New Points of Non-Traditional Food Distribution Have Empowered Consumer Choice

Americans are embracing these choices even as legacy marketer’s cringe. Who's after restaurant food dollars? Simply put everyone including retailers from Tommy Bahama, Macys, and Ikea.

Why should you care if Walgreens is selling fresh prepared Ready-2-Eat and Made-2-Order sandwiches? Why should you care if Amazon-Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Safeway and Wegmans are selling Ready-2-Eat and or Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared pizza? Why should you care if Coinstar is selling Seattle Best Coffee at 1,000 locations around the United States for $1.00?

You should care because they are selling it, and you are not! The fastest growing sector of retail foodservice for the past four years has been the Convenience store sector. The C-store sector's growth in large part has been driven by freshly prepared food. Non-traditional avenues of distribution are growing, gobbling market share while establishing new patterns of consumption, price points, and customer loyalty.

The Shopper Is in Control Spurring New Retail Food Formats

Trader Joe's and Amazon -Whole Foods have created Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food items with qualitative differentiation as an entity with an identity that has helped propel them into Ready-2-Eat fresh prepared food leadership.

Recent research shows that both Trader Joe's and Amazon-Whole Foods are each known for high quality (restaurant quality) Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat foods with distinctive offerings. More important each is leading with innovative products and package size that create value and have positioned each chain as a food shopping destination for meal components customized and personalized for immediate consumption or mix and matched for a meal time at home. In short, they are stealing your customers.

Walgreens is now growing price, quality, and speed of service advantages over legacy retailers. Legacy restaurant chains must reconsider the speed at which they evolve and adapt or non-traditional outlets will capture profits margins as well.

Traditional views of meals and mealtime can pretty much be discarded. Legacy retailers waiting for the "next big thing" to copy simply might be out of luck this time. Legacy food retailers may not like to be first movers very much but it may prove that waiting too long will not work this time.

Product, Packaging, Placement, Portability, and Price

The retail food world is evolving at an ever-increasing pace filled with innovation in food, portion size, points of distribution, and quality fresh prepared meal solutions. The price, value, service equilibrium is resetting in retail foodservice. In order to edify the brand and reinforce consumer relevance restaurateurs must leverage Foodservice Solutions® Five Ps of food marketing.

Many legacy food retailers continue to practice brand protectionism, stifle the brand while diminishing consumer relevance. The consumer is dynamic, not static. Brands must be dynamic, evolving with the consumer. Four years of watching other retail sectors thrive should be long enough. Success in the restaurant world is no longer simply about what happens within your 4 walls.

Are you trapped doing what you have always done and doing it the same way?  Interested in learning how www.FoodserviceSolutions.us 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:  www.FoodserviceSolutions.us for more information.

Farms Stores' Drive-Thru Convenience Three Ways

 

Retail foodservice is littered with ‘look’ a like concepts from fast food restaurants, grocery stores, and convenience stores.  However, according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® there is one retailer that seems to be doing three of the most customer relevant things right today.  That company is Farm Stores.

Dinner, lunch, snacking, or breakfast consumers want fresh food fast and at Farm Stores they have integrated consumers concerns into their concerns and they seem to be winning according to Johnson.  

Here are the three things Johnson thinks Farm Stores are doing very well:

1.       Customers can place orders at either the drive-thru,

2.       At walk-up windows,

3.       Orders can also be placed in advance using the Farm Stores mobile app.

 

You have to like this, Farm Stores bills itself as "the drive-thru version of the '10 Items or Less' checkout lane of your supermarket, plus the drive-thru version of your favorite coffee shop or convenience store."

Here is why they are doing what they are so good at:

 

1.       Recent 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

Candy Clay, a general manager at Farm Stores, stated, "A lot of times you're getting off work you forgot something at the grocery store and don't want to go all the way back in the grocery, so you can drive-thru and get it,"  "Or, you have five kids and don't want to drag them all in to get eggs and milk, you got us."

Andrew Taylor, Farm Stores director of operations, stated, upon the opening of a new store in Toms River, NJ. "We think we have a product and a solution for the everyday consumer that benefits their daily lifestyle."  The team at Foodservice Solutions® thinks so too!

Invite Foodservice Solutions® to complete a Grocerant ScoreCard, or for product positioning or placement assistance, or call our Grocerant Guru®.  Since 1991 Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma, WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant niche. Contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or 253-759-7869

Farm Stores: C-Store Opens “Better-for-You” Drive-Thru Besting Restaurants

Chain restaurants made the ‘Drive-Thru’ iconic but it took a convenience store to make a ‘better-for-you’ drive-thru exploiting another chain restaurant weakness, the inability to evolve as fast as the consumer according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

Meals, meal components, fresh foods and essentials are what convenience stores are leveraging to garner incremental customers and Farm Stores understands that. In May Farm Stores targeting more restaurant customers will open a new 640-square-foot drive-thru c-store made from repurposed shipping containers, according to CNN. The idea was inspired by owner and CEO Maurice Bared's experience in construction.

Farm Stores opened in Miami in 1957 with a 350-square-foot drive-thru that sold fresh food and dairy products while restaurants made the drive-thru iconic Farm Stores is making it a family three meal platform and fashionable according to Johnson.

Maurice Bared, Farm Stores owner and CEO recanted “In the 1950s, Americans were already going to drive-in theatres and drive-in diners”.  Farm Stores now has 65 locations in Florida. The company became a franchise in 2015 and has a plan for expanding Farm Stores nationwide.

The Louisiana store will be the first to debut the shipping container model, which Bared said is about 40% cheaper than building a store from the ground up. “Bared continued “I had this vision of a Farm Store in a container for two reasons”…. “First, the shoebox layout of a container is the same exact size as our stores. I also grew up in the construction industry with my father having his own business. It’s where I saw the foremen had converted shipping containers into their offices.”

The store is made with two containers, welded into place on a concrete foundation. It features tiled floors, sliding glass doors and a canopy over the roof. The inside includes a baking station and employee bathroom.

The company plans to build all new stores in repurposed shipping containers, and over the next seven years, they aim to have as many as 600 new Farm Stores under development. More than half of those are already underway.   The halo of better for you and family dinners there is nothing new about that; but building it for less while doing good in the minds-eye of the consumers that’s fashionable.

Looking for success clues of your own? Foodservice Solutions® specializes in outsourced food marketing and business development ideations. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities, technology, or a new menu product segment.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, www.Linkedin.com/in/grocerant/  or www.twitter.com/grocerant