HOME-BAKED FOR THE HOLIDAYS

KAREN DeMASTERS

Despite growing time demands, there are still many people who bake their own breads and desserts for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. And, retailers are planning a number of promotions to take advantage of the desire to include home-baked items in this year's holiday meal plans.

The many festive items found on baking aisle shelves have a history of steady growth, with the vast majority of sales taking place in November and December, prompting supermarket retailers to do their best to cash in on holiday sales.

"People here still bake for the holidays. I think it is the rural influence," said Chuck Jones, senior buyer for Scolari's Food and Drug Co., which has 19 stores in Nevada and California. "If you go 10 miles from any area in our towns, you are out in the desert and people still cook the way their grandmothers did."

Some of it also depends on the weather, said Ross Nixon, vice president of merchandising for Dahl's Food Markets, based in Des Moines, Iowa.

"The colder it is, the more people will bake. We do promotional prices to try to take advantage of that," said Nixon, referring to the policy in the 11 Dahl's stores in and around Des Moines.

The overall sales record for items included in the baking aisle is somewhat difficult to determine because there are so many different things that can be considered part of the category. Some items, such as bread mixes, have shown a healthy and steady increase in sales each year, increasing from $83 million for the 52 weeks ended Sept. 14, 1996, to $103 million the next year -- a 23% gain -- to $119 million for the 52 weeks ended September 2000, according to statistics compiled by ACNielsen, the Chicago-based research organization.

Other items, such as cookie mixes, have realized a dramatic increase: from $28 million for the year ended September 1996 to $67 million for the year ended this September.

Still others have shown almost level sales with little increase, such as muffin mixes, which have held steady for the past four years at about $215 million, and chocolate chips at about $220 million.

The numbers supermarket managers and owners are interested in, and the ones they most want to take advantage of, are the seasonal figures that show those same bread mixes having total sales of about $6 million per month in the summer and then climbing to $10 million in November and $15 million in December, according to ACNielsen.

Other items like gingerbread mixes do five times the sales in December that they do in June, which would seem predictable, while cake decorations and cocoa double in sales from June to December, ACNielsen numbers show.

"Our problem is just keeping up with the sales during the holidays and keeping shelves stocked," said Mike Richbaw, grocery manager for Food Markets Northwest, which consists of three Thriftway stores in and around Seattle.

"We barely have to do promotions. The challenge at that time is to keep items on the shelves," he said.

Particularly in the Seattle Thriftway located in an affluent area of the city, people bake from scratch during the holidays, using not only pre-packaged cookies and cake mixes, but even more raw ingredients of flour, whole spices, nuts and specialty sugars and salts, Richbaw said.

"This is a gourmet store and the high-end baking mixes do well, but the raw ingredients do just as well. We expand the space for the baking aisle as much as we can, although we are limited on space, but we plan to do it even more this year," he said.

Michael C. Madigan, pricing manager at Camellia Food Stores, based in Norfolk, Va., said as much as 80% of the spices, flours, pie crusts, pie fillings and other baking items will be sold during the last two months of the year.

"We have a holiday check list that goes out to the store managers about now so they have all the items they need stocked for November and December," Madigan said. "We may not sell as much as we did 10 to 15 years ago, but a lot of people still bake because they think it is a healthier way to eat."

Camellia, which has 35 stores in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina, will use some coupons that give a percentage off baking items and other straight price reductions for the 10 to 12 weeks of the holiday season. Items are displayed on in-aisle shippers to draw the shopper's attention, he added.

By mid-November the Scolari's stores have all received front-of-the-store displays for the holiday items that will remain in that dominant place until after the beginning of the year, Jones said. The displays are 30 feet long and provide enough display space for a wide range of categories, including flour, canned milk, cranberry sauces, frosting and cake mixes, gelatins, sugar, cocoa, broths and many more, he said.

"Three-fourths of the canned milk sold is during those two months," Jones said. Different items are featured with price reductions with the customer's club card, he added.

Displays are the main means of promotion for Dahl's also, Nixon said, plus price reductions that can range up to half price off for flour, 25% off spices and 15% off nuts.

"When you start counting in the syrups, paper liners, foils and all the ingredients, you can be talking about 300 or 400 items that could be considered baking items," he added.

Flours alone come in wheat, rice, corn or oats. Wheat flour can be made from hard wheat or soft wheat, depending on the amount of gluten in it, and can be graded as all-purpose, self-rising, pre-sifted or instant, and can be bleached or unbleached.

Sugars and salts come in almost as many varieties. And this year, a new item among the sugars in the baking aisle is Splenda, a no-calorie sweetener made from sugar that will be sold in individual packages for sweetening drinks and in bulk packages for baking. Previously, it had been available only to commercial food manufacturers.

Another new product is coming out for the holidays from Hodgson Mill, based in Gainesville, Mo., and Champaign, Ill. The mill is introducing a multi-grain bread mix with milled flax seed. Milling allows the flax seed nutrients to be absorbed by the body, making the bread a healthier product, said Paul Kirby, vice president of sales and marketing. The company has a broad line of bread mixes, flours, cornmeals, corn starches, yeast and batter mixes, as well as pastas.

Baking aisle items also extend to include bakeware and cookware by such companies as Wilton Enterprises, based in Woodridge, Ill. The company changes the shape of the cake and baking pans that are available to coincide with each holiday, said Nancy Siler, manager of consumer affairs, and usually has five to 10 stockkeeping units in supermarkets.

The bakeware is a necessary part of holiday cooking because it is cake, brownie and bread mixes, as well as flours, sugars, spices and baking chips that sell the best in the coming months, said John Corcoran, category manager of Big Y Foods, located in Springfield, Ill.

"Promotions are the key to sales in our area," Corcoran said. "We have hot sale prices for key items."

Some of the items normally displayed in the baking aisle will be moved to the meat department or other locations during holidays.

"We also use end caps for spices and we display quite a few shippers with key items, so we have all of our normal shelf space plus displays in additional spots to take advantage of the seasonal demand," Corcoran said.