THE MAIN COURSE

ROSEANNE HARPER

Fresh meals are no longer served exclusively in the deli/food-service department. Supermarkets are making room at the dinner table to include the ever-expanding meat case.

In fact, it looks like prepacked, precooked entrees have found a home in fresh meats where they're residing with family-sized packages of mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese.

That's not to say meals activity hasn't been fired up in supermarket delis and food-service departments. It has. But manufacturers keep expanding their menus of fully cooked entrees, and more companies, including regional ones, are jumping into the category. The revved-up competition in this past year has served to boost the quality of the products and their packaging, sources told SN.

In response, retailers have increased displays by adding brands and varieties and, with promotional money readily available, they've sent off their own blitz of advertising, with cents- or dollars-off deals. Some retailers have extended their private-label lines.

"We're watching the category very closely. There's certainly movement, and I'm amazed at the number of varieties on the market now. They've more than doubled, even tripled, in the last year or so," said Pat Ragusa, vice president, perishables, at Earth City, Mo.-based Save-A-Lot, a Supervalu company that has 300 corporate stores and supplies about 800 independents. "We had a cutting just a few weeks ago and there must have been 50 items on the table, and those were vendors' best movers. In the Save-A-Lot world we offer a limited assortment, the highest velocity items, but we keep looking for the best."

Ragusa added that the retailer has narrowed the choice to a small number -- beef tips, pork roast and meatloaf -- and they're going to do an in-and-out, Special Buy promotion with some of them. "That's one of the ways we test items. Typically, we make the product available for a two-week period," he said.

Other retailers told SN that they're adding variety as more comes onto the market, and they're seeing steady sales growth.

Indeed, ACNielsen figures show that refrigerated, fully cooked entrees merchandised in the meat department rose by double-digit percentages from 2002 to 2003 both in tonnage and dollar sales. The Schaumburg, Ill.-based company's statistics show lunch meat, bacon and refrigerated entrees -- the latter growing the most -- accounting for three-quarters of total dollar gains in packaged, refrigerated meats.

All the retailers SN talked to confirmed there's lots of activity and gratifying sales going on in the category. Some also added that they've taken other actions to make things as easy as possible for their customers. As one retailer put it, "We have a whole generation that doesn't know how to cook and they need all the help they can get."

That help includes offering a bigger assortment of value-added, oven-ready and grill-ready, stuffed and marinated items. In some cases, retailers are packaging the products in brown-in or cook-in bags so the customer can just set the whole, unopened package in a roasting pan and turn on the oven.

On recent visits to stores in the Nashville, Tenn., area, SN noted a significant amount of space has been dedicated to several brands of fully cooked entrees in the meat departments. At Kroger and Publix Super Markets stores there, at least three feet of five-tiered shelves held several brands. Both Cincinnati-based Kroger and Lakeland, Fla.-based Publix have taken the business seriously enough to introduce their own private labels.

In fact, Publix just launched its private-label line in February and is making a big deal of it [see "Publix Intros Fresh Line of Prepack Meal Entrees," SN, March 22, 2004].

An initial eight varieties of family-sized entrees, plus half-pound containers of shredded beef and shredded pork with barbecue sauce, make up Publix's new line, which got a send-off with colorful signs, balloons and demos.

While it's too early to evaluate the sales success of the new line, beef-with-gravy entrees are expected to shine, because Hormel's fully cooked roast beef is currently a top seller, a Publix source said.

A Kroger unit on Nashville's outskirts displayed five varieties of Kroger's "Meals Made Simple" proprietary brand of fully cooked entrees. There, meatloaf with ketchup sauce led the pack with the most facings.

A regional independent, Lunds/Byerly's, Minneapolis, is offering twice the number of brands and stockkeeping units of fully cooked entrees as it had a year or two ago, and has doubled display space dedicated to the products, said Scott Ruth, vice president of purchasing at the 20-unit, privately owned independent.

At Piggly Wiggly Carolina Co., which has 116 stores in Georgia and South Carolina, director of meat operations Lacey Tarver told SN the company, which has its own proprietary-label line, has added probably 30% to 40% to its variety of fully cooked entrees in the last year.

Tarver said he sees a good future for the category, but he was even more enthusiastic about ready-to-cook items.

"There's a lot going for value-added, and we have something nobody else around here has. We'd done well for a long time with our spiral-sliced ham, but we started packaging it in a cook-in bag so the customer can just set the whole thing in a pan and turn the oven on," said Tarver.

The company is selling well over five times as many of those hams on holidays as it had before it packaged them in cook-in bags, and with Easter coming up, Tarver said the bagged hams will serve the company well.

Getting things ready to slap on the grill or push into the oven is a priority at chains and independents that do their meat cutting in-store, and even in some that don't.

An official at Publix said that in the chain's Florida stores, space dedicated to ready-to-cook fresh meat items like marinated roasts with carrots and potatoes packed with them and round steak pinwheels with spinach has easily been doubled in a year. That chain does all its value-added items in-store.

Meanwhile, Kroger is bringing in most of its value-added items, except for kabobs. Case-ready kabobs don't hold up well, a source at a Nashville Kroger unit told SN. As a result, that store is making marinated kabobs every day in its prep room.

At a newly opened Wild Oats Market in Nashville, SN noted that the service meat case featured a large proportion of value-added items. Huge pork chops with cranberry-herb stuffing and beef-asparagus-provolone wheels were standouts.

"We went aggressive with value-added items about a year and a half ago. We put together a picture book with recipes and all stores have it. It's for the sake of consistency from store to store. There are 63 items in the book, and stores have some leeway as to what they make each day," said a Wild Oats executive at that store.

Current meal efforts in both deli/food-service and meat are encouraging, industry sources told SN, but they lament the fact that supermarkets aren't doing much to bring people into the store to get their lunch or dinner.

"That's the missing ingredient. Retailers are finding ways to offer the convenience of getting meals at their stores. I think immediately of Kroger's Chef's Shops. The one here is great, and you do see it right away inside the door. But supermarkets need to start communicating with consumers before they get to the store. They could do it like restaurants do, with banners outside, or at least use their Web sites," said Stephan Kouzomis, president, The Meal Market Solutions Group, a division of Entrepreneurial Consulting, Louisville, Ky.