MEAT CASE TERMED UNAPPETIZING TO WOMEN

LIZA B. ZIMMERMAN

AUSTIN, Texas -- The supermarket meat counter, if seen as a gruesome jumble of raw slabs of meat, can be less than appealing to many a female shopper.

But Linda Bebee, the vice president of domestic marketing at the Texas Beef Council here, has a game plan to tame the beast in your meat case and capture more sales to females.

She said making the meat counter more female-friendly often starts with the eye-catching and descriptive point-of-sale materials.

"Women love color brochures. If they can picture it and it looks good, then they might be more apt to prepare it."

A good meat marketing tool is an extensive demo area. "I would love to see a culinary center where women can watch a demo or take home prepared food," Bebee said. She envisioned such a center as a place where shoppers could also ask questions and would find all the ingredients for a complete recipe readily at hand.

Another highly appealing, and often undermarketed, category for women is that of lean meat. "Women are interested in knowing there are lean cuts and they need to know the cooking methods [to use with them]."

She also stressed the importance of presenting women with a good variety of convenient options when marketing meat to them.

"Convenience is a big thing. They want to see something that's put together with the ingredients in one place, that's a meal idea."

Offering easy home-meal replacement options can make the decision of what to buy easier for women to tackle. "Shish kebab, stuffed and rolled products are all appealing, [as are] strips and added-value options that are already prepared so not much prep time is required." She again stressed the inherent value that convenient meal solutions, like marinated products, offer today's busy women.

"Women like recipes which could be attached to the package so you could peel them off," Bebee noted. Other opportune places to hang recipes might be in holders and around the full-service meat case.

Through recipes and cooking suggestions on the packages retailers should give women "new ideas on things to do with cuts like sirloin, which can be thrown on a grill, sliced and put in strips in a salad or pasta dish or used to make a sandwich."

Another way to build sales to women is to change the way meat is packaged to make it warmer and more customer friendly. The type of packaging likely to grab women's attention might rely on "a lot of color and not just clear labeling," she said.

Adding color is only half the battle. In today's meat case full of rodeo imagery on packages, it's hard to find any one cowboy who stands out, or one that is particularly geared to attract women's attention. Why not try to give the package a "home-chef look" instead, Bebee suggested.

She added that cross-promotional ideas -- such as offering a new product, like a bottled spice, with the meat -- are highly marketable, and suggested cross promoting both in the meat section and where the other product is sold.