ADS HELP HEAT SALES FOR ICE CREAM MONTH

BOB BAUER

Enticed by numerous ads from retailers, shoppers scooped up the savings and treated themselves to loads of ice cream during July, National Ice Cream Month.

By mid-July, supermarkets nationally were doing better than last year in terms of sales of ice cream and frozen novelties.

The numbers through the end of the month were not yet available at press time. Scanning data through July 18, however, showed sales of bulk ice cream were up 9.6% to $344 million, and novelty sales were up 7.3% to $199 million, from the same portion of July 1993, according to the International Ice Cream Association. The store scanning data was compiled by Information Resources Inc., Chicago.

Retailers contacted in the last week of August said they've been stressing heavy promotion of ice cream as a summer-long push, rather than a one-month focus.

Pat Sibbles, vice president and frozen food merchandiser for Pathmark Stores, Woodbridge, N.J., said her company has been taking ice cream promotion even further, to expand beyond the season.

"Ice cream to us now is no longer a summer item. We treat it as a year-round item. If you look at our ads in any given week, you'll see a major ice cream feature on the front page, 52 weeks out of the year. To go in and say 'focus on ice cream during the summer vs. the winter' -- that's not so."

Sibbles said there is some fluctuation in novelties promotion. "We do go in and put more emphasis on novelties and create some novelty ad space that you would not see in the winter. But it's really not focused on one month. It's really a summer-long

promotion we start in May and run through the end of August."

Pathmark "did better in novelties this year than the prior year. We had a more extensive line available," she added. "In this marketplace, ice cream certainly heated up. If you look at the kinds of programs that were being run in the marketplace overall, there were some extremely hot programs out there."

Sibbles said it was too early for her to make a year-to-year sales comparison. "The only thing we can do is look at market-share data and say that in spite of all the competitive activity we were able to hold our own."

A buyer for a Western retailer said his ice cream sales were nearly double what they were a year ago, although he did point out his chain has 21 stores this year vs. 16 stores in 1993.

His shoppers bought 117,000 gallons of ice cream in July of this year, compared with 61,000 gallons in 1993. June was even better with a sales volume of 136,000 gallons.

"All of our gross is on cheap ice cream," he said. "Our customers are poor, so we like to boost the cheap ice cream. We saw a definite increase."

John Post, head merchandiser and buyer for Dave's Markets, Cridersville, Ohio, said his company did well with lesser-priced items, also.

"We did a tremendous amount of volume on half-gallons of Velvet ice cream. We also ran a 5-cent Velvet popsicle sale that's basically at cost. They're packed 24 to a box and we just break them open. They can buy them as a full pack or individually. We had tremendous success."

Post said his company's ice cream advertising basically begins and ends with Velvet, the chain's private label. "We don't do a lot of advertising on national brands of ice cream."

A buyer at a Southern chain reported strong sales of ice cream and novelties all summer long.

"I don't have sales figures in just yet, but things have looked real good," he said. "We ran some heavy advertising, particularly in July. Most of it was in newspapers or in our circulars, but ice cream got big play."

Sibbles said the end of the summer won't bring about a major change in the makeup of the chain's frozen food departments.

"If we were going to do anything, we would probably look at the novelty line. To restructure out of the summer is really a major undertaking. I'm not sure what we're going to do yet. We're probably going to take a little longer to evaluate where the sales are coming from. It's just not good enough to go back and look at last year's history."