From The Fall 2004 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

Put Freshness First for Sales

Laurie Budgar

Please squeeze the produce—your customers do. More than anything else, they want to know that the food you’re carrying is fresh.

In our survey, we asked consumers what service components they’d be least likely to give up. We thought we knew what was important—price and staff knowledgeability, right? Wrong. Overwhelmingly, in every store format, including conventional grocery, the answer was freshness.

It’s almost impossible to overemphasize this point. In our detailed interviews, respondents told us that they were willing to pay more, drive farther and wait in line longer in order to go to the store with “really fresh baked goods” or a really great selection of fresh organic produce. On average, people who shop for naturals products are willing to travel an additional 10 minutes—up to a maximum of 40 minutes—for each perceived day of freshness.

So if you’re tempted to recoup costs by keeping the organic cucumbers in the bin because they’re just a little soft, think again. Customers will notice (they’re squeezing, after all), and they will go elsewhere. What you make up for in shrink control you’ll lose in customer loyalty.

Consider the experience of Sarah Park, of Charles City, Va., who said, “There wasn’t a lot of turnover in the organic chickens at my old store. They would be stinky as soon as I brought them home. I stopped going there.” The lesson? If you can’t present a category well or get it to move quickly, don’t stock it.

Once you’ve established your store as having the freshest selection of the natural and organic products you stock, you can concentrate on the other service components that matter to customers, like selection within a category or pricing.

Customers respond well when stores become known for a “signature category,” whether it’s local produce or fresh bakery products. Adrianne Mossman of Phoenix makes a special trip to a store she perceives as having a lock on its signature category. “They offer, like, seven different types of a hard-to-find European cheese,” she said. This only matters if it differentiates you from other stores in your market. The key is to be first and to do it best—and to make sure customers know it. If they don’t, they’ll go to a specialty store. Delores Delosos of Wildwood, Mo., does. While her primary store, Schnuck’s, has a good selection of natural foods, the deli, bakery and produce at World Foods—“kind of a health food store that also has lots of world foods”—entice her to shop there.

Many consumers also expect to find lower prices for naturals products in a supermarket than they would in a naturals superstore. Don’t let them down. Use coupons or special promotions if you must, but develop a low-price image. Naturals customers want their supermarket experience to offer them one-stop shopping, and it can be, if your organic mac-and-cheese is priced better than it is at the naturals store down the road.

Sidebars:
Service Components That Create Loyal Customers
Preferences for Mix of Natural/Organic Products vs. Conventional
Signature Categories