MEATING THE FUTURE

STEPHEN DOWDELL

HIAWASSEE, Fla. -- Gooding's Supermarkets, Apopka, Fla., invited the future -- 500 cases worth of future -- into its meat cases here for a day, to feel what it would be like to fill up and merchandise an entire department with one thing in mind.

That one thing is the consumer, and those 500 cases contained about 300 stockkeeping units representing the meat industry's vision of what the consumer wants, as interpreted by the Annual Meat Marketing Conference's store project subcommittee.

Each year, that subcommittee attempts to jog retailers into thinking about how to make the meat department a more effective tool for serving consumers, instead of just a department laid out as a logistical proposition, according to tradition or with convenience for the retailer, not the consumer, in mind.

This year, with the conference held in Orlando, the subcommittee members enlisted Gooding's to offer up its meat cases here as the canvas for their vision of how a department should be managed.

The result was not a perfect picture -- but it was a vivid tableau of how, using real-world products, a meat department could feature drastically more meal-based merchandising than is typical for any supermarket.

In other words, said the project's organizers, if retailers really want to merchandise meat to today's meal-hungry consumer, there are plenty of products out there now that were designed to do just that. But they'd have to be willing to change their thinking.

The Hiawassee department's items were reworked into five consumer-based categories: Kitchen-ready foods, with added-value preparation such as seasoning, marinating or preslicing -- ready for cooking.

Prepared meals, fully prepared and cooked, that ring on the meat key instead of deli.

Fresh frozen, from the frozen-food case, branded or not, cooked or not, that offer meal-based value and ring on meat.

Traditional fresh, which as the label implies are merchandised by commodity.

Traditional smoked, same as above but featuring all smoked items such as smoked hams and turkeys.

Attendees at the Annual Meat Marketing Conference, including many retailers, where trooped through the dream department, and many expressed surprise, and even awe, at the number of value-added products the subcommittee and Gooding's were able to cram in.

Just as important, the categorization by preparation method was executed with new signage, fixtures, props and a hefty dose of merchandising skill.

The store project's players convened in a conference seminar that served both as primer on how they did it and a post-mortem on the results. The seminar was moderated by David Merrefield, executive editor and associate publisher of SN.

Merrefield characterized the Hiawassee experiment as a "fight-back strategy" to counter the syphoning of food sales from supermarkets into food-service operations.

"What happened at Gooding's is a way of focusing activity back into the meat department, of showing that it is a significant player at the supermarket level in solving this problem."

Jerry Blout, vice president of perishables for Gooding's, acknowledged that supermarket meat departments surely could benefit from some refocusing.

"We all know what the challenges are, we all see the erosion of sales in our meat department," he said in the seminar. "We used to think that we knew who our competition was, it was the guy in the supermarket across the street. Now we are finding out it is other meal-alternative sources that have really become our primary competitor."

"We see all the product that manufacturers are trying to produce for us, to fill the void we have in our supermarkets, and I think that as they come in to us one at a time, we tend to think, 'how is the customer going to receive this, what are we going to get to sell the product through, where am I going to put it?' The benefit I saw in this is that we would have a live store marketing and merchandised to address this. Frankly, we are like everybody else, we are looking for ways to recapture that which we have lost."

Blout said the reset was not easy, but the result was instructive. "I saw the truck, I saw the product, and I had to wonder where we were going to put all this stuff. I think that what was interesting was that instead of marketing in a shotgun approach, this was rifle shooting, in terms of today's consumer."

The product-resetting strategy was managed by Bill Pizzico, president of Prizm Marketing, Blue Bell, Pa., a marketing consultant. He said the challenge of "total meat management" is to get suppliers and retailers focused on the same target -- the consumer.

Total meat management is a comprehensive program to engage the consumer at every level of the packing, processing and retailing process, to meet consumer demand in real time.

"It is based on category management, but it has the meal-planning component driven by the consumer. The basic principle is to define categories by method of preparation, which is what we saw at Gooding's."

Pizzico said such consumer-based planning "changes the entire dynamics" of the business, re-orienting it to work on the consumer pull rather than the industry push to achieve sales. He also said it makes the meat department an integral component of any supermarket's strategy for "RMR" -- short for "restaurant-meal replacement," a phrase he offered as a better-aimed substitute for home-meal replacement.

Finding enough meals-oriented product to import into the department was not a challenge, according to Chuck Jolley, publisher of Meat & Poultry Magazine, Kansas City, Mo., the subcommittee member charged as liaison to the suppliers.

But the project did point up to weaknesses in supplier follow-through that are limiting the chances of consumer-based meat merchandising becoming more than a one-time exercise.

"There is a huge number of new products out there," he said. "And most of them do not get the adequate amount of merchandising or marketing required for them to be a success, or a failure.

"One of the major knocks that you can put on the meat industry is that it does not quite know how to effectively market or merchandise a lot of the products," Jolley concluded.

And assembling products and rethinking placement is just the start, said Norma Gilliam, director of public relations for the merchandising products and services provider Hubert Co., Harrison, Ohio.

"Supermarket shopping is probably not one of their favorite activities, so anything you can do to make them feel better about shopping is going to keep them in the store longer."

All these challenges were met to render the concept department inside the Gooding's unit. The organizers and meat-department staffers pulled it off over a single, long night, finding ways around obstacles such as last-minute equipment problems and signage inadequacies.

Gooding's did get all 500 cases in without losing any of its everyday SKUs. And, as a topper, it had advertised the project as a one-day special, a "Gooding's meat department of the future," all offered for half-price discounts from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Blout said the store reported briskly selling out the department. While the inducement of drastic discounts surely helped, shoppers earlier in the day were shouldering the touring meat executives aside to make real-time purchases at real-world prices.

If the consumers at Gooding's Hiawassee store that day are any indication, the market may be more prepared for the future than are the retailers that serve it today.