Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I remember sitting in on the company’s monthly board meeting, covering while our produce director was away. Since these think-fests went on all day, the veeps were merciful and allowed that we attended just the hour time slot that was relevant to the produce operation.
However, on this occasion I listened into the grocery director going over the tail end of his presentation. He mentioned how the frozen food category (at the time) introduced on average about 30 new items per month.
And behind the scenes with these items existed expensive support funding for shelf space, national advertising in print and often with television. Because of this ongoing blitz, grocers are compelled to make room for the 30 items, which means 30 existing items either get space reduction or are discontinued all together.
Business can be brutal, especially if your products are on the discontinue-or-not bubble. So much for the friendly façade of your local grocery store. The ever-growing frozen section is obviously extremely competitive.
Fresh produce also has its own version of this products-in, products-out carousel.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be open to trying new things. In one grand opening we had years ago, I met with a local vegetable processor to try a whole line of new items. We had a refrigerated island case to work with, which provided about 12 linear feet and several shelves.
So, we brainstormed with the veg processor, who agreed to deliver directly to the new store to ensure freshness. We offered a range of retail packs of different types of chopped onions, chopped peppers, soup mixes, stir-fry vegetables mixes and chopped hard squashes.
You name it, we seemed to have the value-added equivalent ready long before value-added even had a name.
The item I was most proud of was, of all things, jicama sticks — an 8-ounce pack of jicama, peeled and sliced into slender sticks and ready for dipping and snacking. This is gonna be a winner, I thought. School lunch boxes, game day munchies, so many applications — slam dunk.
The value-added section was a nice, grand opening “ahhh-attraction” — albeit temporary, as sales overall were lukewarm, then flat. Shrink shot up in the makeshift category, and after a few weeks we pulled the plug on the concept.
Hey, we tried, right? Keep in mind this was years before stores attempted any in-store cutting for either fruit or vegetable offerings.
As for the jicama sticks, they sold well as expected, especially with a little sampling worked in. Sales were encouraging enough that we set it up as a regular item companywide. Not long after this, every store received a case or two, and we worked it into the existing packaged salad cases.
Then disaster hit.
Apparently, cut jicama has a very short shelf life. After it went through our warehouse distribution cycle, through the reserve, the pick slots and to the stores, the product blew up, as we sometimes say. Quite literally. “Snot sticks” became the adopted, however tempered, euphemism for the sliced jicama.
I was bummed. Worse, I had to absorb the criticism from the produce managers, who rightly don’t sugar coat their opinions. Perhaps it was the technology of packaging that created the failure; perhaps it was the fickleness of the cut vegetable, or maybe it just wasn’t that good of an idea to begin with.
But like I told everyone during store visits: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So, who’s up for stocking a combination plum-pitter and cherry peeler?
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. Read more of his insights here.
