From The March 2004 Issue of Natural Foods Merchandiser

Knowledgeable Staff Boosts Natural Sales

Vicky Uhland

A naturals category manager for a large supermarket chain has a dilemma. He wants to staff his naturals section with the type of employees found in health food stores. He figures that these knowledgeable, committed employees will bring in knowledgeable, committed customers.

But his bosses don’t see the point. Why spend the extra time and money training employees for a naturals section? Why can’t the employees be available to work all sections of the store? And why is it so difficult to recruit and retain naturals section workers?

“The conventional grocery industry just doesn’t get it. [Naturals sections] need knowledgeable employees who care passionately. Employees are the naturals stores’ secret weapon,” says Carolee Colter, principal of Seattle-based Community Consulting Group, which specializes in operations issues for natural foods stores.

Not only are people who shop in naturals stores used to informative employees, the products themselves demand a well-trained staff, Colter says. “These products don’t sell themselves. [Customers] need to be able to talk to somebody, and a computer information kiosk isn’t going to do it. Somebody contemplating a lifestyle change, like a wheat-free diet, needs to ask questions.”

Recruiters agree that naturals section employees—from hourly workers to category managers—choose their jobs for more than just money. “It really is a labor of love. Nobody goes to work in a health food store just to work there,” says Heather Berg, president and chief executive of Seattle-based Berg Recruiting Naturally. Instead, she says, workers are usually drawn to naturals-related jobs because they’re concerned about health, the environment or social causes. “People who really care about healing the world—I could see someone like that going to work in a mass environment.”

So what can a conventional supermarket offer its naturals employees?

Salary and benefits. While many naturals employees say they don’t work solely for cash, they still have to bring home the seitan and fry it up in a pan. A stocker or floor employee in the large natural foods stores and co-ops may only start out at $7 or $8 an hour, Colter says. Smaller stores often pay less. In addition, few stores offer full benefit packages, including health insurance and pension plans.

At the management level, a good naturals category food manager should make about $65,000 a year, which is comparable to other supermarket categories but more lucrative than some naturals store management jobs, says Bob Shealy, associate vice president of The Judge Group recruitment company, based in West Conshohocken, Pa.

Training. Many naturals workers are self-trained because they’re interested in natural products in general. But if a store offers training, that’s frequently seen by potential employees as a boon, particularly in complicated categories such as supplements, where there are product claims, scientific research and legal issues to learn about.

Colter says it can take 40 to 60 hours of training a month for three to six months to allow a staff member to have a comfortable grasp of the supplements category. “Some of that time can be spent working in the store, but there should be several hours a day where they’re studying and not working with customers.” She suggests hiring professional naturals trainers or subscribing to an online training course and asking product brokers or distributors to make presentations to employees. In addition, she suggests, “Turn trainees into trainers—they learn about a subject like omega-3 and -6 oils and make a presentation.”

Naturals employees who work in other grocery categories probably need about a month of training, Colter says.

Autonomy. An employee who is used to being one of many in a health food store may be thrilled to be one of few in a supermarket’s naturals section. “I could see how a supermarket could give [health food store employees] an opportunity to run their own shows,” Colter says. “There could be room for individual initiative and creativity—saying, ‘This could be your department, and you could shape it’—product line, endcaps, picking your own staff.”

This has an added advantage, Berg says, “because a quality person is only going to work in a [naturals department like] a vitamin department if it has quality vitamins.”

As a rule of thumb, Shealy says, a staff of three to four people can cover a three- to four-aisle naturals store-within-a-store eight to 10 hours a day. One full-time employee could handle a 200-square-foot naturals department, provided there was an outside stocker, he says. But why even bother with a dedicated employee in such a small section? “A lot of times [those sections] are distributor-stocked and the store personnel doesn’t even touch it. If they don’t touch it, it’s not getting any TLC,” Shealy says, and hence lacks the attention naturals shoppers expect.

In order to find a naturals category manager who can handle this autonomy, Shealy recommends hiring regional or corporate office staff from large naturals stores or distributors, rather than retail department managers. “A team leader at Whole Foods is competent to run a department, but not competent to go into a chain and do $1 billion a year in sales. [Regional or corporate] staff has a different focus than a store manager. They’re more generalists. They know how to turn passion into a profit—have a mission but still put money in the bank.

“You’ve got to have somebody creative enough to create demand [for naturals products in your store].”

Vicky Uhland is a Denver-based free-lance writer and editor.