From The Winter 2004 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

Branding Makes Mark on Fresh Foods

Laurie Budgar

Quick—name a brand of broccoli. What about a brand of rump roast? Can’t do it? Don’t worry. It may not be long before the answers roll off your tongue as easily as Perdue does for chicken, Sunkist does for oranges or even Bunny-Luv does for carrots.

While branding has long been part of the marketing mix for produce and meats, it is now becoming a central issue. “Branding is not new to the industry,” says Kathy Means, a spokeswoman for the Produce Marketing Association, “but it certainly has expanded in the last 10 to 15 years.”

The reasons for that are myriad. For one, competition in the category is heating up, forcing manufacturers to move beyond mere category promotion, `a la Washington apples. “Any time you go through a branding experience with a product that is kind of seen as generic, the reason you do it is so you can get a premium price,” says marketing consultant Marty Baird. If regular carrots sell for 19 cents a pound, he says, but you can convince people that your “carrots are sweeter … grown in organic soil … and hand massaged,” they’re soon seen as worth the 45 cents a pound they command.

Consumers are partly responsible for the push toward branding fresh foods. “I perceive that if I buy ‘X’ brand I have less risk than if I buy generic,” says Baird. That perceived risk—or lack thereof—may encompass anything from concerns about food safety to the desire for consistent high quality, freshness and flavor.

Consumers also are beginning to perceive fresh produce more as a food category than an agricultural commodity, says Means. Innovative packaging is partly responsible for that shift, she adds. As salads and vegetable mixes are increasingly sold as prepackaged foods, they begin to lend themselves to branding.

Building a brand
But it’s not easy to generate consumer awareness of a brand. “For us to have to educate [the consumer] and say, ‘In April, we want you to look for Sunview grapes,’ that’ll never happen,” says Simkha Weinstein of Albert’s Organics, which was established in 1982 in Los Angeles and now operates a handful of distribution centers throughout the country. “The solution is for us to create our own brand.” That’s exactly what Albert’s has done with its new Grateful Harvest line. By working with growers for more than two decades, the company has developed relationships and has come to learn what each grower’s specialty is and when its produce is in top form. “What we’ve done is bring the cream of the crop, the best of what each grower has to offer,” says Weinstein. “If we have one brand out there, that says: ‘This is the best.’”

For that reason, several grocery chains are opting to create their own brands, says Baird, citing Albertsons’ Essentia line of frozen foods as an example. “If you can create the whole category as the brand, you kind of get the leverage, the investment.” The downside? “It’s unbelievably expensive.” Adds Baird: “For a retailer to try to build a brand is just cost-prohibitive. The idea of running commercials that don’t sell a particular product, but just create an image of how something is done, is an astronomical expense.” The only other way to achieve brand awareness, he says, is through guerilla marketing—where the retailer/manufacturer creates a cult following. “The challenge is, any time you try and create that countercultural, viral marketing, it’s a very uncontrolled reaction.” So it’s possible, Baird says, to end up with a result opposite of that intended—that the product is perceived as schlock.

Albert’s Organics helps stores that carry Grateful Harvest to promote the brand by providing point-of-purchase information. These materials not only promote the brand, but also alert mass-market shoppers to some of the food issues that organic producers try to address. “One of their biggest concerns is the legitimacy of organics,” says Weinstein. The brand, he says, creates a sense of familiarity in unfamiliar territory. “It says, ‘Yeah, you can trust this brand.’” Albert’s positions Grateful Harvest as a “complete solution for introducing and retailing organic foods” in its print advertisements. “It’s a simple one-world, one-food kind of thing,” says Weinstein.

Other manufacturers take a different approach, offering exclusivity to a retailer. “It creates profit, but the other thing is it creates loyalty from consumers,” says Baird. “Now it creates the whole marketing experience [for the retailer]. We can increase sales dramatically with premium sales from just one brand.”

Branding meat
Produce isn’t the only product in the perimeter of the store that’s reaping profits from branding. Meat merchandising has been revolutionized by branding. Safeway has its Rancher’s Reserve brand of beef, while Kroger has Cattleman’s Collection and Albertson’s has AngusPride. Each is touted for its superior tenderness and flavor. But the real opportunity for branding lies with natural meats, says Mel Coleman Jr., chairman of Denver-based Coleman Natural Meats. “The natural meat category is growing at 35 to 40 percent. Conventional beef is growing at about 2 to 3 percent.”

It’s not lost on Coleman that the term “branding” originated with beef. In the old days, multiple ranchers would put their cattle out together. “When the cattle came off the ranches, they could sort their cattle out from everyone else’s,” Coleman says. For natural meats, the brand still serves the same function.

Because the term “natural” is so loosely defined, much of Coleman’s branding centers on differentiating its ranching practices from the rest of the herd. “The minimum you have to say [to call a product natural] is ‘minimally processed and contains no artificial ingredients,’” Coleman says. As for antibiotics and growth hormones, the cattle must be free of them for only 90 days to earn the natural label. By that standard, “you could just label almost any beef or any poultry as natural,” Coleman says. His company’s cattle, on the other hand, are never fed antibiotics, growth hormones or animal byproducts.

Whether it’s natural beef or organic produce, though, the brand will come to reflect all of a consumer’s attitudes about the product, says PMA’s Means. “No matter how good your brand is, if the product is not good, the consumer will know it.”