Innovating the Food Buying Experience

In Sunday’s New York Times, Mark Bittman presented an idea that many readers might have found controversial: organic food is less important than getting Americans to generally eat better. His reasoning was that the impact of “a simple shift in eating habits” would have significant health and environmental benefits.

I agree.

Mr. Bittman belongs to a distinguished list of “real food” advocates that have been calling for important and overdue changes to the American diet, including:

• Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
• Marion Nestle: “Eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables.”
• Alice Waters: “Good food depends almost entirely on good ingredients.”
• Michelle Obama: “You can begin in your own cupboard by eliminating processed food, trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables.”

I doubt many people would disagree with these food luminaries, with the possible exception of the major food companies selling us “edible food-like substances” (thanks Mr. Pollan). To learn more about why they might resist, I recommend reading “The Perils of Ignoring History” on Bill Marler’s blog, which draws potential parallels between Big Tobacco and Big Food.

If it were as easy as suggesting to people that they eat less processed food (and possibly paid more per calorie), which is intuitively obvious but doesn’t play well in the marketplace, we would be well on our way. We are not.

We need a game plan.

My recommendation is that we start with a vision of where we ideally want to be. This blog is dedicated to the vision of Sustainable Food on Every Kitchen Table™, and our journey toward that vision begins by attacking the point where consumers make their purchase decisions – food retail, especially supermarkets.

Supermarkets, which account for nearly 60 percent of sales of food at home in the U.S. (75% when you include supercenters and warehouse clubs), are where consumers are confronted hundreds of times a year with tens of thousands of food choices covering everything one might imagine…and likley tens of thousands of additional food products that they would never have imagined.

• Top 50 U.S. Supermarket and Grocery Chains

The vast inventories carried in these stores are supported by over $10 billion spent on sophisticated food advertising and approximately 17,000 new “food products” flooding the market every year, making today’s supermarkets highly efficient selling machines. Unfortunately, leading food companies make most of their money selling highly processed foods, made up of inexpensive ingredients from monoculture crops (e.g., corn, soy, wheat); major contributors to today’s health and environmental problems.

• Top 50 Food Manufacturers/Processors

My last blog post provided a potential framework for designing a new, consumer-oriented retail experience that connects consumers with real food. Whether that idea, a derivative, or something entirely different is part of the solution, without Real Food-oriented shopping experiences, preferred by consumers, it is difficult to imagine slowing down or effectively evolving America’s mechanized food system.

 

Related Information and Links:

• 10 Innovative Sustainable Food Retailers
• Why Community Supported Agriculture Isn’t Enough
• Is Organic Food the Answer?
• Supporter of Food Renegade’s Fight Back Fridays
• Follow me on Twitter: Jambutter

Is Organic Food the Answer?

After recently posing a question on Twitter regarding people’s opinions on whether organic or sustainable food was more important, it became clear that our food problems are far bigger than this limited characterization.  Simply put, we must find innovative ways to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of the food people eat.

For example, a relatively small, but fast growing segment of the population is connecting with local farms to learn about where their food comes from through weekly farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) programs.  While these rich and educational interactions are nearly ideal, they are not available to a vast majority of people who spent $535 billion at nearly 35,000 supermarkets across the country in 2007.  And it is unrealistic to assume farms could handle interacting with over 300 million Americans stopping by every week, even if we significantly increased the number of farms or expanded the size of current farms.

To reach mainstream America, we need new and innovative ways to connect consumers with sustainably grown, processed and transported food. That will require redesigning much of today’s conventional food system; a system designed from the ground up to meet the financial needs of America’s leading food businesses (regardless of what they tell us).

I propose we start the redesign at the point where food and eaters meet and buying decisions are made – the retail channels, e.g., supermarkets.

First, we need to significantly reduce the number of food products offered to consumers, currently estimated at 45,000 items in the average supermarket. Reducing the massive amounts of visual information, including conflicting and (intentionally?) confusing messages associated with marketing and nutritional claims, will benefit consumers that are finding it nearly impossible to make their way through the aisles without picking up a lot of strategically placed, highly processed, unhealthy food products.

And even when shoppers make a list before entering the store, which research shows 70 percent of shoppers do, only 10 percent adhere to the list, according to Marion Nestle in What To Eat.  Ms. Nestle goes on to say, “Even with a list, most shoppers pick up two additional items for every item on the list.”  Such impulse purchases, which are highly profitable for the store, are no accident, nor are the confusing messages or lengthy aisles.  Today’s supermarkets are expertly designed to maximize what consumers see in order to maximize what they buy.  This simple formula has been refined over decades to a profit-generating science. 

Next, we need to introduce an entirely new in-store labeling methodology that visually helps consumers easily characterizes the overall sustainability of a food product in terms of its health (including nutritional information), environmental, economic and social impacts. Some customer may equally value all of these aspects of sustainability, while others may emphasis only one or two.  For example, someone concerned with global warming would look for products with the highest Environmental grade when making their purchase decisions.  Getting as many products in a store labeled in such a way will help consumers quickly find the raw and processed food products that best match their needs.

Finally, implementing these ideas will require an entirely new, consumer-oriented retail experience, one with far fewer products, especially highly processed and prepared foods, in a much more intimate space.  Within such a store, you would also rethink displays to ensure that the intelligent, easy-to-understand labels were clearly visible for every product.  This new retail experience will fit in a significant scaled down store when compared to today’s mega stores, with a median size of 47,500 square feet in 2007, according to the Food Marketing Institute, representing a complete departure from the more products, more product lines, bigger footprint mentality that has dominated food retail for decades.

What we end up with, after a lot more hard work (and a few waves of our magic wand), are intimate, consumer-friendly food stores in every neighborhood in America helping people to eat like Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and other leading voices in the food movement recommend.

 

 

Related Information and Links:

• 10 Innovative Sustainable Food Retailers
• Why Community Supported Agriculture Isn’t Enough
• Follow me on Twitter: Jambutter