09.16.2009

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Healthy Eating and Food Retailing

The Risk of Overly Narrowing the Frame

Listen to this week's Podcast >>

For years now, we’ve been urging clients, especially CPG clients, to accept that retail is the dominant force in modern consumer culture. The ability of Whole Foods and Walmart to transform suburban food shopping behavior in the past 15 years is something we hope few food marketers can deny.

One of the privileges of being a food retailer is that, unlike a CPG brand stuck in a narrowly defined category of food with limitations on its use, the entire eating day is, and should be, a food retailer’s “target market.”

And therein lies the rub for those who want to narrowly focus their retail brand on healthy eating. Our most recent research on healthy eating, plus our recently compiled Eating Occasions Atlas™ of American food culture (see sidebar on the right), both point to the myopia this kind of thinking represents.

Healthy eating is a real marketplace. Let’s be clear about that. Yet, the traditional food industry definition of healthy eating as positive nutrition, functional benefits and “low in…” orients mostly to what we call Instrumental Eating Occasions, when the consumer is not even necessarily ready or able to enjoy the food they’re eating. How many people savor their nutrition bars? Their protein drinks? Their “healthy” breakfast food on a busy weekday morning before work? We haven’t met many. For food retailers, the sale of these kinds of products to healthy eating occasions is good business, but it doesn’t necessarily help build their brands as active players in contemporary food culture.

Understanding the Three Zones of Quality Consumers choose different categories and brands based on the occasion.
Instrumental Eating to get things done	Savoring Eating to enjoy food for food’s sake	Intellectual Eating to delight in fine distinctions of food
Energy drink: Red Bull	Coffee: Starbucks	Wine: Tiny California Vintner

What does build a food retailer’s brand strength is its ability to tap into the burgeoning development of Savoring occasions in our lives, occasions when people intend to really appreciate the flavors, textures and aromas of food.

Interestingly enough, healthy eating is often a part of Savoring occasions in the sense that the consumer preference is for minimally processed, fresh food. What tends to fade into the background on Savoring occasions are the more pointed health concerns we are familiar with: moderation, functional benefits, and positive nutrition. These occasions are ones where sensual enjoyment of the food is the primary goal.

Trader Joe’s is one of a handful of retailers that has figured out how to retail both to healthy eating and to Savoring in the same retail environment. And, they do it with primarily packaged CPG products! They have picked a common ground for their entire portfolio—minimal processing (a signal of higher quality)—that allows them to do this quite well.

Food retailers who over-emphasize overt healthy eating cues (moderation, positive nutrition, functional benefits) will end up killing their credibility on Savoring eating occasions that are most powerful in building retail brand loyalty.

After all, which eating occasions do you recount to friends? Your healthy eating occasions or your Savoring ones?

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