Customers Are Abandoning the Legacy Grocery Store for Fresh Food.

If consumer spending is any indication of consumer choice, it’s beginning to look a lot like U.S. consumers are increasingly opting for Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food meal assembly rather than traditional grocery store cook from scratch, clean the kitchen, do dishes, and cook one meal for the entire family. 

I hope you are not a legacy food retailer with 60,000+ square feet of floor space lined with shelves stocked with products manufactures are paying to you to place on the shelves.  If you are it just might be time to contemplate abandoning the status quo and begin Looking A Customer Ahead. 

Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru™ has been warning legacy food retailers to stop focusing on ‘basket size’ and think Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food and customer frequency instead. Today’s consumer are trading grocery carts filled with ingredients for mix and match meal components according to our Grocerant Guru™ Steven Johnson. 

Here is the problem for grocery retailers both the restaurant sector and convenience store sectors are selling Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food as well. In fact  restaurant sales including take-away food sales have overtaking grocery sales for the first time in recorded history in March 2015 according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

The on-going shift in U.S. demographics combined with an evolving make-up of family dynamics, this shift might very well be picking up so much steam legacy grocery retailers may never regain the top spot.  There are an estimated 75.3 million Americans are ages 18 to 34, compared with 74.9 million baby boomers, and the younger population is expanding as more immigrants enter the ranks, according to the Pew Research Center.  Let’s face it we know what’s happening to the baby boomers. Don’t let happen to your brand.

Households are more multi-generational and multi-ethnic than ever before.  Combine that the exposure to more and more bold flavors from various parts of the world with an instant gratification focus and an lack of cooking from scratch skill set and what to get is Grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat retail world.

Foodservice Solutions® team has found repeatedly as regular readers of this blog know consumer timer after time tell us ‘better for you’ means not having to cook or clean-up.  Simply put ‘better for you’ is about instant gratification, customization, personalization, and family meal cohesion. 

Are you trapped doing what you have always done and doing it the same way?  Interested in learning how Foodservice Solutions 5P’s of Food Marketing 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