NEW YORK -- Supermarkets in and around the city, even though they court lunchtime customers, are not making single-serve dairy drinks easy to buy.
r, N.Y., had positioned a couple of items -- Silk soy milk and Stonyfield Farms drinkable yogurt -- outside the dairy case. They're in a wall case devoted to vegetarian items, near small containers of cut fruit and within reach of rotisserie chickens and vacuum-packed cold cuts.
But in the dairy case there, single-serve milks are all but obscured by coffee lighteners. They're displayed on two shelves below 32 facings of flavored CoffeeMate on a shelf amid other coffee lighteners and buttermilk, and just above the case's well, which contained a single, gable-top quart of goat milk on the day SN visited.
Stop & Shop, Nanuet, N.Y., at least displays the drinks on eye level. NesQuik and Silk, six facings of each, on the top shelf, are above the coffee lighteners. But those items are separated from other single serves, like Jakada and Hershey's flavored milks, by a long wall of gallons and half-gallons.
A&P's flagship store in Woodcliff Lakes, N.J., gives single-serve, reclosable milks more of a presence by grouping them together on the top shelf of the dairy case: six facings of NesQuik, four of Hershey's, four of A&P's private-label America's Choice, three of Smith Dairy's Moovers and another three of six-packs of smaller Moovers.
Right in midtown Manhattan where lunch seekers are everywhere, supermarkets are not merchandising single-serve dairy drinks at the front of the store, where other grab-and-go items like sandwiches and soda are grouped together in a secondary deli display. In Gristede's and Food Emporium, the dairy aisle is actually on another floor. There, the presence of the drinks is minimal, and in D'Agostino, the only single-serve, reclosable product represented is NesQuik with two facings.
