Restaurants Food and Beverages Are Essential On-Line Items

If success leaves clues and it does, there is not a retail food outlet today that should not be expanding their online meals, meal component, and beverage options according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® who stated, “Mix and Match meals and meal components are the hallmark driving the continued growth of the grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food.”

In case you had not hear CryptoMonday recenlty presented data showing that the Food and Beverage (F&B) sector is beginning to make inroads in most online shopping platforms. Their presentation showed that F&B has the highest conversion rate among all e-commerce verticals. It scored a conversion rate of 4.4%, besting Health and Beauty (3.3%) and Beauty and Skincare (3.05%), among others.

So, “If you want to boost your e-commerce sales, consider focusing on the food and beverage sector,” says CryptoMonday’s CEO Jonathan Merry. He adds, “Food and beverages are essential items. So, they have a higher chance of undergoing the full checkout process than non-essentials. This helps retailers ease the conversion of users into customers when selling these products.”.

The food and beverage sector's high conversion rate can be attributed to several factors. First, consumers are increasingly turning away from brick-and-mortar stores in favor of "click-and-collect" services. These allow them to shop at home before picking up their order at a local store or delivery location. Think express lanes for drive-thru’s according to Johnson.

Secondly, e-commerce platforms make it easier for shoppers to find what they want quickly. They can find what they want in a matter of minutes using search filters. That saves them the time needed to trawl through rows of products like those in person. This makes shopping online seem more efficient than its offline counterpart.

Here is the best part, 2022 witnessed shoppers abandoning a significant volume of their online shopping orders. The reasons for their abandonment are as varied as are the shoppers themselves. But for the American shoppers, the primary reason for the abandonment was excessive shipping costs. Coming a close second was faulty discount codes.  Now consider that Amazon Prime members can get a free year of GrubHub+ there can be little doubt that meal and meal component delivery will only expand.

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 us on our social media sites by clicking one of the following links: Facebook,  LinkedIn, or Twitter 

Edible Looking Outside the Box to Drive Growth

 

Success does leave clues and regular readers of this blog are familiar with the ongoing growth and success at Edible. We last talked about them when they expanded their product line to include the ‘Editable Bakeshop’.

Once again looking outside the box, while listening to customers touchpoints, Editable is complementing both the fresh fruit arrangements and a weak customer touchpoint gift giving messaging with the launch of Printible greeting cards.

So, most of you know that Edible, is the world’s largest franchisor of fresh fruit arrangements and other treats, is expanding its portfolio into the greeting card industry with the launch of Printible now. Leveraging new technology designed for growing a new product category of seasonal and everyday greeting cards that can be digitally customized to create truly personalized gifts is a perfect fit according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

Printible is but another one of Edible’s outside the four walls, outside of the box growth innovations that combine convenience with enhanced value through personalization. Just within the last month, the company re-designed existing technology to launch “Edible, Your Way,” an initiative that allows customers to design their own dipped fruit boxes, fresh produce boxes and now fresh fruit arrangements all through Edible.com’s user-friendly customization offerings.

So, Printible is the next key ingredient in creating a fully customizable gifting experience through Edible.“The future of retail lies in personalization, especially when it comes to gifting,” says Cheikh Mboup, president and COO of Edible Brands. “For Edible, this year has been all about catering directly to our customers’ immediate wants and needs, especially in light of the ongoing pandemic. We intend to continue upgrading the Edible customer experience to be as custom-made as possible throughout the remainder of 2020 and in the coming years, and we are excited about Printible as the next major development in this evolution.

Printible is a platform for customizable greeting card sales across select Edible locations, through which customers responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to incorporate additional personalization into Edible’s wide array of gifting products. The cards and customization capabilities of Printible are unique to Edible, made possible with proprietary technology created by the brand’s technology solutions arm, Netsolace.

“Printible is starting with cards, but the sky is really the limit here,” says Sai Padmanaban, Vice President of Netsolace. “We see this new technology as a perpetual opportunity to fuel Edible growth through innovation, allowing the brand and its franchise owners to enhance the gifting experience in a way that is truly unique from one customer to the next.”

Success does leave clues. One clue that time and time again continues to resurface is “the consumer is dynamic not static”. Are you looking a customer ahead?   Regular readers of this blog know that is the common refrain of Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.  Our Grocerant Guru® can help your company 253-759-7869.