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Log In / Register | May 22, 2013

Expert Advice

Forty Six Million Reasons Why Restaurants Should Think Ahead

Expert | john a. gordon | May 16 | food, manage
Note from John Gordon: Several 'fast casual' summits will be conducted this year, one this week before the NRA Show kicks off in Chicago. Steve Johnson, the Grocerant space expert, and I feel the future of food retail is not to look back and see what worked in the past, but to look forward, thinking carefully about the customer. The following are Steve's good thoughts: 46 Million Reasons Restaurants Should be Concerned In three years between 2009 and 2012 NPD reported that the grocery/supermarket sector increased sales of prepared meals by 46 Million. That occurred in a short three year period.  Chain Drug stores have taken notice and continue testing, fresh prepared food at locations from coast to coast. Five years from now as restaurant chain leaders return to...
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Restaurant Brand Protectionism Will Lose Customers

Expert | Steven Johnson | May 6 | food
I have noticed that Kodak is nearly out of business. Growing up in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, every family had a Kodak Camera and I still have one of mine. Those yellow boxes were everywhere and getting your very own Kodachrome camera was seemingly a rite of passage, heck, Paul Simon even wrote a song about it. As digital cameras gained popularity, Kodak stuck to what they believed. They sneered at digital’s quality, righteous in their knowledge that Americans would NEVER give up shiny pictures for their photo albums. Today, cell phone cameras take most of the pictures and they are rarely printed. Kodak will shut the doors, correct in their assertion that professionally developed pictures look better than low-resolution versions uploaded to Facebook. Being dead and...
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Breakfast Sandwiches Outrank Coffee

Expert | Steven Johnson | May 1 | food
The evolving face of retail foodservice continues pointing to the success of the grocerant niche filled with ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat fresh prepared food.  The NPD Group reports that breakfast sandwiches outrank coffee. It is the first time that has ever happened since NPD began the tracking it in 1985. In the case of the breakfast sandwich it is one step back and ten forward. Harry Balzer, NPD’s noted researcher and international presenter, said: “The beauty of the breakfast sandwich is that you can get that 1950’s breakfast of eggs, toast, cheese and meat all in one and you can walk out the door if you want to." One of the drives is Portability one of Foodservice Solutions 5P’s of food marketing. It is a driver because Americans are eating more...
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Australia’s Private Label Food Growth Clues; Should Global Brands Worry?

Expert | Steven Johnson | Apr 12 | food
In a recent Nielsen's Homescan survey conducted in Australia found that “Private label products account for 18.3 per cent of Woolworths' packaged grocery sales, up from 16.8 per cent in April 2011.”The report found that sales of Australia's Woolworths private-label brands have grown two to three times faster than national, international brands; private-label products in the past two years. Trader Joe’s in the United States has been embraced by consumers and in fact Trader Joe’s which is 95%+ private label also has the highest sales per square foot in the United Sates of all retail food companies. What does that say for the future of national and international brands today? In Australia consumers have embraced Aldi which like Trader Joe’s is near...
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Welcome Back KFC

Expert | Steven Johnson | Apr 12 | food
How long has it been since you visited your local KFC? You needed a reason or a reminder, right? We think KFC is following our advice and becoming consumer relevant once again. If you were to harken back to the days KFC was called Kentucky Fried Chicken. That was a time KFC was garnering new customer daily with Take-Out buckets of Ready-2-Eat chicken. The world fell in love with a time saving alternative to cooking. Could that have been the beginning of the rise of the Grocerant niche? We think so. It’s great to see two examples where KFC is getting back to its roots vertically integrating Foodservice Solutions® 5 P’s of food marketing: Product, Packaging, Placement, Portability and Price. In our ever evolving foodservice world, the 5 P’s of food marketing are...
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McDonald's Fish McBites Flounders

Expert | Passikoff and Shea | Apr 9 | food
Real fishermen have a saying: “a bad day of fishing is better than a good day at the office,” but perhaps not at McDonald’s. Not this month, anyway. It turns out that Fish McBites – offered in three different sizes and a new Happy Meal – didn’t lure enough customers into the chain to help U.S. sales last month. The paltry catch cast a pall over the brand’s headquarters because the company hadn’t netted a monthly decline in global sales for nearly 10 years. Until last October. And this January. And again in February. So whatever strategic bait they think they’re using, it isn’t working as well as the corporation hoped. Their profits have floundered, a situation that must have more than one shareholder carping at McD’s CEO,...
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Chicken Sandwich vs Burgers. No Contest.

Expert | Bob O'Brien | Apr 9 | food
On the menu, in the mouth…chicken sandwiches and hamburgers are two different things. A long time ago when I was beginning my time with The NPD Group I read an article about items that appeared on menus around the US.  At that time the “club sandwich” was the number one item appearing on menus. This sounded right to me. Who doesn’t like a good club sandwich? However, I had a moment of clarity and realized that we had the data to confirm that this was the number one item in restaurants. Our consumer foodservice market research, CREST®, continuously documents exactly what people eat. What I found was that club sandwiches finished way back in the peloton of the menu item race.  Hamburgers, beef burgers as they are called outside of North...
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The New Normal in Foodservice?

Expert | Bob O'Brien | Mar 27 | food
Remember the recession in the early 1990′s? It was short and deep and was dubbed the “white collar” recession since the job cuts during it and the subsequent “re-engineering” fad resulted in a greater share of white collar job cuts than previous recessions had. The restaurant industry did not come out of that recession with a bang. Sure, there was an initial bounce but there were, in my memory, many quarters of anemic traffic and check growth in the aftermath of that recession. That’s why I have wondered at the “new normal” meme floating through the business discussion these days. So I went back and looked at our CREST foodservice market research from that time. Yes, there were quarters of unremarkable growth, BUT they only...
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Papa Murphy's Leads Consumer Ranking

Expert | Steven Johnson | Mar 27 | food
Ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat fresh prepared food is the hallmark of the grocerant niche.  Technomic conducted an extensive in-depth study / survey for its Consumer Restaurant Brand Metrics online database.The consumer feedback is based on ongoing data collection and compiled from a nationally representative sample of more than 80,000 annual consumer restaurant visits and found that consumers rank GROCERANT NICHE leader Papa Murphy’s Number One. Regular readers of this blog know we have highlighted Papa Murphy’s time and time again. However in this quality study by Technomic of 80,000 visits covering 115 branded restaurants Papa Murphy’s is number one.  There can be no doubt that the attributes driving the success of the ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat grocerant...
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Betty Crocker Cooks Up Restaurant Meal Delivery

Expert | Steven Johnson | Mar 19 | food
Betty Crocker just might be on her way you your house with dinner. Legacy food manufactures are being replaced in grocery stores with fresh ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat prepared food.  General Mills the one time owner of Red Lobster and Olive Garden understand the evolving consumer marketplace and does not want to miss playing a vital role in retail foodservice moving forward. In a quest to reintroduce and introduce Betty Crocker to an entire new generation of dinners while leveraging and targeting seniors with the familiar trusted Betty Crocker Brands; face, food, and flavors, General Mills continues industry leader. General Mill’s is launching a unique food delivery service in the Minneapolis -Saint Paul, Minnesota area. Under the General Mills umbrella named “Betty...
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