Category Advisor: Commercial Baked Goods: Flowers Foods

Flowers Foods has long prioritized innovation, product quality, in-store execution and category leadership to drive the continued success of its Nature’s Own brand, which is considered No. 1 in household penetration, purchase frequency, repeat sales and customer loyalty as measured by IRI panel data.

Nature’s Own maintains the highest average retail price in the soft variety segment and continues to grow its share of the segment in its core market, currently at 43.6 percent of IRI South FDMx. While only available to 53.5 percent of the U.S. population, Nature’s Own is the No. 2 loaf brand in volume sales in the United States.

Adding to its tradition of product innovation, in 2010 Flowers introduced Nature’s Own Sandwich Rounds. Although it wasn’t the first of its type on the market, the strength of the brand, coupled with a resealable package, brought new consumers to the segment. Nature’s Own 100 Percent Whole Wheat Rounds and Multigrain Rounds are the No. 3 and No. 4 sandwich rounds in IRI South. Flowers now offers four varieties of sandwich rounds, and has extended the resealable bag to a new line of Nature’s Own Thin-Sliced Bagels, introduced in February 2011.

Flowers continues to provide its retail partners with objective and sound ideas that benefit the overall category. In the past year, using automated scripts and analysis tools, Flowers efficiently optimized retailers’ shelf configuration and assortment at store level. Pulling consumer insights from loyalty card programs, IRI panel and scan data, trip mission studies, and other sources, Flowers gave its retail partners impartial business assessments and recommendations.

The company also continues to offer a variety of additional retail solutions, including dedicated, on-site category analysts; benchmarking; promotion analysis; assortment studies; new product analysis; and outstanding in-store execution.

Flowers’ fresh packaged bread retail sales are up 2.4 percent, outperforming the category year-to-date through Aug. 7, vs. last year (total U.S. food/drug/mass).