Bing is quickly learning about the Grocerant Niche Are You

 

Top of the day to you!  The team at Foodservice Solutions® wants to thank Microsoft’s Bing for writing today’s Blog.  Our team ask some basic questions about the grocerant niche and here is what Bing came up with:

According to the web search results, Steven Johnson is the founder of Foodservice Solutions® and the resident Grocerant Guru®. He coined the term Grocerant and was first to be published in both Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Business Magazines in the spring of 1996 defining the space¹². Grocerant is a term that describes a grocery store that sells prepared foods or a restaurant that sells grocery items.

Grocerants are a hybrid of grocery store and restaurant. They typically sell grab-and-go meals or sometimes even offer sit-down dining and table service¹. Consumers are migrating to the grocerant niche because they offer convenience, variety, quality and affordability²³⁴⁵⁶. Grocerants can also help customers save time and money by combining food shopping and eating in one place². Grocerants are not only found in grocery chains, but also in other retailers such as clothing stores, convenience stores and niche supermarkets^7891011.

Grocerants can benefit local producers in several ways. Some of the benefits are:

·         Grocerants can help support the local economy by keeping money in the community and reinvesting with local businesses and services¹².

·         Grocerants can help local farmers keep more profit by reducing transportation and distribution costs and buying directly from them¹³.

·         Grocerants can help protect the environment by reducing the use of fossil fuels and maintaining farmland and green space in the community²⁴.

·         Grocerants can help promote local food culture and diversity by showcasing local specialties and flavors⁵⁶.

·         Grocerants can help create local employment opportunities by increasing the demand and productivity of local food⁶.

 

Some examples of grocerants are:

·         Whole Foods: a nationwide chain of grocery stores that offers fresh, eco-friendly, health-oriented groceries and a variety of ready-to-eat meals, an in-store dining area, and even cafes. The store features made-to-order sandwiches, hot pizza, sushi, hot bar, salad bar, and pre-made sandwiches and wraps¹².

·         Central Market, Safeway, Giant Eagle, and Kroger: grocery chains that sell freshly prepared rotisserie chickens, salads, and sandwiches, and most also offer sushi and beverages³¹.

·         7-Eleven, Wawa, Sheetz, and QuickChek: convenience stores that sell fresh and prepared sandwiches, salads, and beverages, and some locations offer dine-in seating¹.

·         Tommy Bahama, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Brooks Brothers: clothing stores that have or are planning restaurants selling fresh prepared food in-store⁴.

Foodservice Solutions® team is here to help you drive top line sales and bottom-line profits. Are you looking a customer ahead? Visit GrocerantGuru.com for more information or contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us Remember success does leave clues and we just may the clue you need to propel your continued success.

Jersey Mike’s Customer Relevance has to be Consumer Facing

The team at Foodservice Solutions® and our Grocerant Guru®, Steven Johnson have been touting the strength, relevance, new electricity, and loyalty that Esports can bring to a foodservice partnership. Jersey Mike’s understand the relevance and importance of this new sector of sports most of you have simply over looked.

Here is an example from ‘GeekWire’ this week that will give you an example how important the tech industry thinks Esports is and how big they think it will get. According to Geekwire “Microsoft agreed to pay game streaming star Tyler “Ninja” Blevins between $20 million and $30 million per year to join its Mixer streaming platform and leave incumbent leader Twitch, according to a new report from CNN detailing the arms race among tech giants to land big names for their streaming services.

Ninja is one of several high-profile streamers recently poached from Twitch, which Amazon bought for close to $1 billion in 2014, by the likes of Mixer, Facebook and YouTube. CNN reported that streamers with 10,000 or more concurrent views on Twitch are receiving offers of more than $10 million annually while smaller streamers can get up to $1 million.”

For those of you who are just now hearing about Esports the follows and players are younger demographic, with 75 percent of esports fans being millennials. What demo is your target market? 

As for Jersey Mike’s Subs extending its partnership with Team Liquid, a leading international esports team, through 2022. You should know that Team Liquid, which competes across 17 distinct esports.

Program elements include:

·         Jersey Thursdays. The two brands feature content from superstars across Team Liquid’s competitive lineup. Every first Thursday of the month, Team Liquid gives away one Team Liquid jersey and a $50 Jersey Mike’s gift card to fulfill a lucky fan’s sub sandwich craving.

·         Jersey Mic’d. During the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) matches, Team Liquid mics up their players to capture the realest moments in esports, available for fans to download.

·         Subs for Dubs. Team Liquid and Jersey Mike’s celebrate Team Liquid tournament wins by offering fans special discounts on sandwiches, meals and more.

·         New Sub Bombs. Interaction with players and their chat through the “JerseyMike’s” Twitch account, mass gifting to their chat a “sub”scription to that channel.

Are you integrating new electricity into your brand? Johnson stated “that in my minds-eye the new electricity must be very efficient for the supply chain and includes such things as fresh foods, Online ordering, delivery, plant based foods,  sampling, toy’s, beer, developing brands, unique urban clothing, grocerant positioning, fresh food messaging, autonomous delivery, cashier-less retail, plates, glasses, cash-less payments, digital hand-held marketing.

All food and beverage retailers to survive the next generation of retail must embrace the artificial intelligence revolution while simultaneously embracing fresh food and beverages that are portable, fresh, with differentiation that is familiar not different.  Does your retail path forward look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Why? This new partnership does all of that. 

Are you looking for a new partnership to drive sales? Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing tactics look more like yesterday that tomorrow?  Visit www.FoodserviceSolutions.us for more information or contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us Remember success does leave clues and we just may have the clue you need to propel your continued success.

Microsoft Global Grocery Technology Platform Elevates Competitiveness

Microsoft excels at developing software technology platforms for business and Loblaw knows a good thing when they see it according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.  

Yes, Canada’s largest food and drug retailer is leveraging Microsoft’s cloud computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help power its digital transformation, with a focus on developing a more personalized experience for customers, while edifying its competitiveness according Johnson.

We must note that Loblaw joins the likes of the top five U.S. grocery retailers by sales — Walmart, The Kroger Co., Costco Wholesale Corp., Albertsons Cos. and Ahold Delhaize — as Microsoft cloud customers.

The Redmond, Wash.-based tech company unveiled sweeping partnerships with Kroger and Albertsons in January and with Walmart last July to use its Azure cloud platform to help drive their digital initiatives. Costco adopted Azure as its hybrid cloud platform in 2017. Other food and drug retailers using Azure include Walgreens Boots Alliance, which announced a partnership with Microsoft in January, and Giant Eagle.

Loblaw worked with Microsoft to integrate its AI technology into the retailer’s PC Optimum loyalty program to tailor deals and offers to members based on their online preferences.  David Markwell, senior vice president of information technology at Loblaw “We’ve partnered with Microsoft to create digital experiences that not only meet our customers’ expectations, but exceed them,”

Markwell continued “A key objective was to “democratize” customer data stored in siloes, a project that Loblaw and Microsoft were able to accomplish in 90 days.” “With the data already collected but separated into different customer experiences, it made sense to move it all to the cloud and to leverage AI tools to drive results,” Markwell (left) explained. “With AI, I see this democratization of knowledge and ability to make decisions being moved out into the business units.”

Using Azure to securely store and process data, Loblaw redesigned its customer data by disassembling the siloed information and then anonymizing and aggregating it to build a feature to customize offers to PC Optimum members at scale.

“It allowed us to cross-pollinate user experiences and deliver it to millions of people at once,” said Peter Danforth, vice president of loyalty program strategy and management for Loblaw. “What AI enables us to do is make a decision at a scale that was just impossible before.”

By using Microsoft’s cloud and AI solutions to redefine the customer experience, Loblaw was able to develop more personalized deals, making a stronger connection with its shoppers. According to Johnson Loblaw is looking a customer ahead.

“Predictive AI can help us to communicate on a one-to-one basis with each customer or provide relevant offerings to each customer,” said Jenny McConvey, director of targeting support and systems at Loblaw. Are you elevating you brands competitive footprint?

Are you looking for a new partnership to drive sales? Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing tactics look more like yesterday that tomorrow?  Visit www.FoodserviceSolutions.us for more information or contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us Remember success does leave clues and we just may have the clue you need to propel your continued success.

Will Bitcoin’s Bet on Restaurants be the Bite or Buzz Needed to Drive Customer Counts

By now most regular readers of this blog know that chain restaurants perennial innovation leader Starbucks may soon allow / enable consumers to pay for their latte with bitcoin. Starbucks has become a food and beverage innovation powerhouse and technology focused company that drives customer engagement with relevance blending interactive technology with participatory food and beverage offerings according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

Starbucks is extending the coffee customization and personalization experience too technology and the payment process by integrating bitcoin into the list of payment options.  Recently Starbucks announced that it will work in partnership with bitcoin exchange operator Intercontinental Exchange Inc. as it forms a new company to “create an integrated platform that enables consumers and institutions to buy, sell, store and spend digital assets on a seamless global network.”

The new company entity will be, called Bakkt, it will employ Microsoft cloud-based solutions to fashion a “global ecosystem” for digital currency, according to the Starbucks press release. “As the flagship retailer, Starbucks will play a pivotal role in developing practical, trusted and regulated applications for consumers to convert their digital assets into U.S. dollars for use at Starbucks,” said Maria Smith, vice president of partnerships and payments for Starbucks,

Smith continued “As a leader in Mobile Pay to our more than 15 million Starbucks Rewards members, Starbucks is committed to innovation for expanding payment options for our customers.” Further operational details about Bakkt will be announced in coming weeks, according to Starbucks, with a planned launch of the company slated for November. So will it drive customer counts? Not today according to Johnson but it will added incremental buzz to the Starbucks brand and down the road it just might.  Starbucks is looking a customer ahead, are you?

Are you looking for a new partnership to drive sales? Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing ideations look more like yesterday than tomorrow? 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.

Who’s Watching the Grocery Store

You have all heard the old adage ‘stack them shelves high and let them fly’ referring of course to product in our case any food product.  All food retailers suffer when there are holes on the shelves or out of stock items, as customer want what they want and want it now. Technology just may be the solutions to out of stock grocery store shelves.

Yes, a robot, named Tally, will begin scanning grocery store aisles at three St. Louis-area Schnucks stores in a six-week pilot program this week. The robot will check aisles three times a day to look for out-of-stock items and make sure items and price tags properly.

Dave Steck, the chain’s vice president of IT and infrastructure, announced a partnership with San Francisco-based Simbe Robotics stating “We’re excited to see what this partnership brings,” “This is just one of many ways that Schnucks is staying at the forefront of technology to enhance our customers’ shopping experiences.”

Schnucks is a regional grocery store chain that has close to 100 stores in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa.  They will use an adjustable robot to monitor items on store shelves but is hopeful that the robot “may open up a world of other possibilities” with the data it collects. 

Simbe CEO Brad Bogolea told the local newspaper that the robot’s ability to find items that need to be restocked and pricing errors allows employees to focus on other tasks. The robot has already been scanning aisles in other stores across the country, including some Target stores in San Francisco last year.

Mr Bogolea stated “The goal of Tally is to create more of a feedback mechanism,” “Although most retailers have good supply chain intelligence, and point-of-sale data on what they’ve sold, what’s challenging for retailers is understanding the true state of merchandise on shelves. Everyone sees value in higher quality, more frequent information across the entire value chain.”

How are you driving down cost, reducing out of stocks items? Do you have redundant programs or systems and still have out of stock items?  If success does leave clues and it does could a robot look at things differently enough to edify your operation?  So just who is watching your store?

Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing tactics look more like yesterday that tomorrow?  Visit www.FoodserviceSolutions.us for more information or contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us Remember success does leave clues and we just may the clue you need to propel your continued success