|
What's New
See what's in store for the New Year in Food Culture. Download our new "Looking Forward in Food Culture 2012" report. |
11.18.2009
“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.
READMORE...
New Value Paradigm: Theatrics of Thrift
The New Value Paradigm provides a provocative, consumer-centric explanation for what to expect from consumer and shopper behaviors as we take the slow path toward economic recovery. The report provides the new consumer understanding for “value” and its implications for CPG companies and food retailers.
Download the order form! >>
Archives »
Click here for an archive of past HartBeat articles
FOLLOW US
Comment »
Print »
E-mail »
Subscribe »
digg
del.icio.us
facebook
Linked in
newsvine
reddit
twitter
friendfeed
StumbleUponEcology of Food Retailing
Maybe it's the heightened emphasis on all things trend worthy. Then again, maybe it's all the talk about the economic recession and how consumers are changing their shopping and eating behaviors. Or, it could just be that mainstream grocery retailers are struggling to maintain “relevancy” with a constantly changing, ever-evolving consumer. What does all this mean for food shopping in the future?
The short answer, which can already be found in many leading-edge marketplaces of today, is that food shopping in the future will center on a constantly evolving collection of more specialized retailers, something we prefer to refer to as an ecology of food retailing.
We define "ecology of food retailing" as the sum total of retail access points where food and beverages are acquired for the household. Whereas the ecology of food retailing in the 1960s consisted largely of traditional grocery stores (with perhaps a smattering of local eateries), today's ecology looks markedly more diverse. Here we find food retailers of all shapes, sizes and formats, a seemingly unending variety of restaurants and meals-to-go options, coffee shops, farmers' markets, community supported agriculture programs, local food cooperatives, airports, school cafeterias, and so forth. Oh, and do not forget that many leading grocery stores (e.g., Central Market and Wegmans) now operate full-size food courts at a quality level that would put those of most suburban malls to shame. Indeed, our ecosystem is a most robust and diverse one.
The allusion to population biology - with its notions of evolution and ecology - is not accidental. For we believe the existing evidence around us already points to a diversity of grocery retailing formats whose shape and character have been sculpted as much by consumer-led innovations (e.g., the explosive growth in farmers' markets) as they have the management decisions of large grocery retailers. And as consumer behavior evolves in lock-step with larger developments in food culture - which affects how, when, where and with whom we eat as well as what we eat - we suspect that consumers will come to play an even stronger role in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of food retailing in the future.
So what does an ecology of grocery retailing look like in the near future? Head to any leading-edge city, and you're already likely to find consumers patronizing many - if not all - of the following formats:
- Small-format retailers offering high-quality packaged foods with a strong focus on private label (Trader Joe's)
- Medium- to large-format retailers offering high-quality foods in prepared, fresh and perimeter categories (Central Marke
