Merchants of all sorts have done it for ages.
You know. Showing off the gleaming paint job and shine of new cars under strategically placed lights. Or slick real estate ads with perfectly staged furniture and glowing lamps within the home. Mannequins display colorful, fashionable matching outfits that subtly shout, “This can be you!”
The goal is to highlight the beauty. Appeal to the eye. It works with hardline goods, and it especially works with fresh produce, like fresh jewels in a case.
To be sure, there's beauty to behold within any grocer. Weekly ads call attention of cuts of meat, to tantalizing, thick deli sandwiches or freshly baked bread, steaming with scored tops.
In the produce aisle? Where do I begin?
Rough handling creates shrink and repels sales. Any respectable produce manager will train a clerk along these lines: “Handle produce gently. See how the mango has more color on one side than the other? That's called the blush. Now rotate each mango to stock it so the beautiful blush faces outward, facing the customer.” The same training message carries forward with everything.
As a merchandiser lays out a wet rack for the vegetables, or the items on any other fixture, they may group products according to destinations, such as a mushroom set, a potato and onion table, a citrus setup, an apple setup and so on. However, within each destination grouping the idea is always, “How can I make this display really stand out? Really pop?”
The answer, of course, is always using vibrant color breaks.
I've found that mixing up the destination groupings can help. For example, stocking lemons next to, say, tomatoes works well; bright oranges near green granny smith apples can stand out, too. On the wet rack, some chains will stock shiny, new red potatoes next to, say, green beans or corn. Beautiful.
No other department in a grocery store has the means or flexibility to really stand out like the produce department does. The cereal or canned goods aisles may look neat and organized. But compare that to a well-stocked produce department with fragrant, green basil stocked next to tomatoes, perhaps alongside the fresh garlic.
Wet racks, neatly displayed, can take advantage of the visual beauty as well. Imagine fresh bunch radishes next to the leafy greens, bulk carrots next to broccoli, and so on.
The goal of every produce manager is to maximize sales, building the basket. You do this by merchandising the beauty of the fresh produce for maximum exposure: Cut a row of halved red cabbage, not only to sell a manageable portion but also to show off the color. In every new store opening we peeled down the red onions in the display, so the vibrant ruby shine caught everyone's attention, even in the comparatively ordinary potato and onion table.
Every fresh produce display can be an eye-catcher, given the right touch and proper care.
The objective, of course, is to slow the customer down. As clean, outstanding merchandising will catch the eye, it helps stimulate the all-important impulse sale. With well-thought-out merchandising, enough labor to carefully stock with eye appeal in mind, offering full and level stocking and same-day fresh offerings, your produce department can leverage the innate quality and beauty to win over the hearts (and shopping habits) of your customers.
Even if the only produce items on their shopping list reads, “fruit” and “stuff for a salad.”
Armand Lobato's more than 50 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions. He has written a weekly retail column for nearly two decades.
