Impressive Display

ROSEANNE HARPER

Whether it was a pick-up truck smack in middle of the floor, surrounded by teetering stacks of cakes, or a “kissing booth” at the end of a path of hearts, both bakery displays got customers to stop, look and buy.

Kings Super Markets’ displays are a feast for the eyes.

Another retailer recently positioned towering animal figures, looking bizarrely out of place, between table displays in the bakery. A cardboard zebra might hold a basket of strawberry tarts; a cardboard tiger might hover over a tableful of strawberry pies.

And just this month, Marketplace Food & Drug in Minot, N.D., brought crowds of gawkers into the bakery by parking a green and yellow 1974 pick-up truck in the department.

“Our bakery sales manager, Peggy Kallias, a long-time [Green Bay] Packers fan, decided to bring her green and yellow ‘Packer Truck’ in for Super Bowl weekend,” said Nyla Stromberg, cake department manager. “Tuesday or Wednesday, we did a lot of moving things around to make way, and then Peggy's husband drove the truck right through the door and back to the bakery.”

Cakes in different sizes, decorated in green and yellow, and also some in the Pittsburgh Steelers' black and gold, were stacked high around the truck.

Kallias and bakery staffers made sure the truck was visible from the entrance of the 90,000-square-foot store, which is part of the family-owned chain Marketplace based in Bemidji, Minn.

Bakery sales soared 10% above the comparable period a year ago.

“We get a sales boost anytime the Packers are in the playoffs or Super Bowl, but I know the truck brought sales up at least 5% more,” Stromberg said.

Down in Louisa, Ky., a K-VA-T-owned Food City store set up a “kissing booth” this year for Valentine's Day.

Heart-shaped cut-outs, attached to the floor to create a series of stepping stones, led customers right into the bakery where Maid Marian, Robin Hood's girlfriend, sat in a colorfully beribboned kiosk, selling heart-shaped cakes and giving away kisses — Hershey's kisses, that is.

“If a customer bought a 9-inch, heart-shaped cake [retail, $5.99] they were given at least one Hershey's kiss,” cake decorator Connie McKenzie told SN.

McKenzie, who helped deck out the kissing booth with pink and red and white streamers, made the cut-out “stepping stones.” On each, she printed the names of lovers well known in literature or history such as Romeo and Juliet, and Robin Hood and Marian.

Meanwhile, the public address system invited customers to “take a walk down the store's Love Boulevard.”

In-store bakery directors told SN they always try to take advantage of holidays with decorations and themed displays, but it's in between holidays, they said, when they really need to get creative to give sales a boost.

Last May, Riesbeck Food Markets, St. Clairsville, Ohio, held a Strawberry Fest merchandising contest, and the unit that won got its in-store bakery very involved.

In fact, associates decided on “It's a Strawberry Jungle” as a theme, and the bakery joined in with enthusiasm.

Bakery associates made animal cut-outs from cardboard, painted them and mounted them high enough to be seen from other departments.

“Those hand-built animals were so eye-catching, we had a church group ask us if they could use them for something they were doing later in the summer, and then the Girl Scouts wanted them after that,” said John Chickery, the 15-unit independent's bakery director.

What strawberries have to do with a jungle, nobody could explain. But, as Chickery pointed out, what difference does it make if all the hoopla attracts attention — and sells more product.

He attributed a significant boost in sales to the animal cut-outs, and also to the number of interesting items the bakery offered during Strawberry Jungle week.

“We offered well over 100 items in bakery that had strawberries in them,” he said. “That alone amazed people. We had strawberry fritters, a strawberry fritter loaf, a strawberry pizza, strawberry doughnuts, just about anything you could think of.”

The most unusual item was a unique strawberry bread. It had a thin layer of peanut butter and a thin layer of strawberry jam baked right into it. So a slice was like a ready-made PB&J sandwich.

Commenting on another promotion, Chickery said getting customers involved always works to draw more people in because they want to see what's going on.

“One of our most successful events is our pumpkin-face cake promotion near Halloween. We have people asking way ahead of time if we're going to do it again.”

For four or five hours on Saturday before Halloween, children decorate orange-frosted, single-layer cakes with funny faces.

“This past Halloween was our second year to do that. The kids have a ball, and it attracts a lot of attention,” Chickery said.

At its flagship store in Short Hills, N.J., Kings Super Markets recently began an ongoing promotion dubbed “Experience Food” that focuses on showing customers how to cook and entertain with food.

This past fall, cake decorators showed customers how to create a “mum” cupcake.

“Customers loved how beautiful they looked,” said Jessica Gasser, director of stores organization, development and training for the Parsippany, N.J.-based chain. “Once they were shown how they were made, customers couldn't believe that they might be able to do that themselves.”

Decorators demonstrated how to make them, including how to mix the colors in the icing to make a realistic looking flower.

“The cake-decorating expertise was shared in a way to encourage the average person to give it a shot,” Gasser pointed out. “We've demonstrated several techniques for customers to use to top cupcakes with roses, tulips, mums, characters, as well as how to make a pull-apart cake.”

Sometimes, a bakery's specialty products are such standouts that they create enough excitement to draw people to the department.

That has been the case at four-unit Highland Park Market, Manchester, Conn.

This independent sells lots and lots of slices of cake, frosted and decorated with a single rosette or other flower.

Chocolate mousse slices have, from the beginning, been a top customer favorite at Highland Park, and one day a creative associate decided to decorate those particular slices with eyes and whiskers and used sliced almonds for ears, creating “mousse mice.”

Ever since then, feet upon feet of mousse mice have been lined up side-by-side on the top shelf of the bakery's service case. And they really do stop people in their tracks, Highland Park owner Tim Devanney told SN.

While they're stopped there, it gives them a chance to take a look around at what else is available.

At Marketplace Food & Drug, “cookie bouquets” are one of those products that are attention-getters, Stromberg said.

They're cut-out cookies on sticks, gathered together and wrapped like a bouquet of flowers. Stromberg, over the years, has prided herself on creating cakes that attract attention. She and her team of top decorators often use startling colors to ice cakes and cookies.

In a region of the country where temperatures sometimes fall to 20 below zero, and the whiteness of snow gets monotonous, color is important, Stromberg said.

Once, in the dead of winter, the team frosted cube-shaped cakes in primary colors, making them look like giant playtime blocks. They set them up right in the front of the bakery.

Stromberg's team recently created a birthday cake that was meant to look like a giant Rubik's Cube puzzle, and it did.

Sometimes what seems like a wildly good idea turns out to be — well, just too much.

One retailer told SN about creating a 72-foot long jellyroll from scratch that was difficult to display. It took up a lot of space.

That winding jellyroll definitely brought customers to a halt, and they bought every inch of it. But unwieldy? Yes. Labor intensive? Yes.

“It was fun, but we won't do it again,” a company official said.