Winnng Game Plans

Sell the sizzle, not the steak.

This catchphrase, coined by stockbrokers in the 1980s, is taking on an almost literal relevance in the current era of grocery retailing.

Supermarket shoppers don’t just want the steak — they also want to know how to prepare it, what’s the best cut for a specific occasion, how to garnish it, what else to eat with it, what to drink with it, how to present it. The retailer that can deliver on all of that in the most effective manner — whether brick-and-mortar, e-tailer or hybrid — is going to wind up the winner.

The concept of category management is undergoing a historic transformation. The cutting-edge concepts that emerged some 20 years ago are being rewritten to take better advantage of the advancements in data collecting, technology and shopper marketing that have emerged in the past two decades.

Retailers and suppliers need to look beyond the aisle toward shopper-centric solutions that encompass multiple departments through creative cross-merchandising. The idea of occasion-based retailing to satisfy specific need states — from snacks to parties to the evening meal — is the new order of the day. The rise of multiple new channels that have tipped the scales away from traditional supermarkets’ long-held dominance over grocery shoppers make such innovation a must for retailers to remain relevant in an age when consumers want it now, and they want it their way.

In their 19^th year, Progressive Grocer’s Category Captains awards honor CPG companies for category management prowess, demonstrated through their partnerships with grocery retailers.

This year, there were 80 total winners among those selected as Category Captains, our top honor, and Category Advisors, our honorable-mention designation.

Creating Destinations

In every department of the store, suppliers continue to show their understanding of retailers’ needs to address shopper demands and offer innovative ways to achieve them, elevating the visibility and relevance not simply of their own brands, but also of their entire categories and, increasingly, other categories store-wide.

As retailers and suppliers work to further unravel the mysteries of Big Data, shopper analytics are becoming an increasingly important guide on how to deliver solutions. Excelling with insights are brands like Tyson in deli prepared foods, Idahoan in center store, Smucker’s in organic juices and Pharmavite in vitamins and supplements.

Destinations are a growing theme. For example, Bimbo USA is building sales in the bread aisle for its retail partners through customized assortments. Gallo Winery is scoring with store-within-a-store merchandising. Smucker’s is generating new excitement for baking mixes with occasion-based strategies. Kellogg’s offers its retailers a Healthy Living destination within the frozen department, where a boost is definitely needed. And Nestlé Purina is helping re-establish the pet aisle as a destination in the grocery store.

Meanwhile, in a mature category like canned tuna, Bumble Bee is leveraging trends for snacking, protein and variety with new flavors and convenience packaging.

Health and wellness continues to rise as a need state in multiple departments. Enjoy Life Foods, now backed by new owner Mondelez International, demonstrates leadership in free-from foods, helping its retail partners engender loyalty among allergen-sensitive consumers. Fresh Express is driving the bagged salad category with functional products. Abbott and Bayer are creating need-based destinations throughout the in-store pharmacy.

Working together to understand consumer behavior is a crucial element for retailers and manufacturers to deliver sustainable category growth. Such partnerships will be essential for grocers to remain relevant and generate excitement for a consumer base that increasingly demands turnkey solutions that transcend traditional aisle boundaries.

GROCERY — FOOD & BEVERAGES

Alcoholic Beverages — Beer
Category Captain

Anheuser-Busch

Anheuser-Busch used its Retail Feature Tool to help its partners better execute their feature advertising strategies. Since beer is a high-traffic category with anywhere from 200 to 600 SKUs in a set, retailers are faced with many choices in their planning. Additionally, they must navigate laws that restrict contracts and market-level pricing. Anheuser-Busch’s tool divides the category according to its key segments (premium, import, craft, value and premium plus) and pack sizes; then it analyzes beer data according to household penetration and total dollar distribution. If retailers want to go further, they can look at data on a national, regional or local level. The tool also leverages previously unavailable data collected through the use of InfoScout’s mobile panel. This allows retailers to better connect to their beer shoppers, and ultimately execute the best advertising combinations in individual markets. Retailers using the tool are seeing increases in traffic and incremental rises in beer dollars. Earlier this year, one retailer in a top metropolitan market implemented a feature program based on the tool’s analysis. In the two months since the program’s launch, retail beer dollars are up 8.5 percent, incremental sales dollars from beer features are up 65.1 percent, and the retailer’s share of market is up 0.8 percent, which is nearly $50,000 per week in beer sales.

Alcoholic Beverages — Beer
Category Advisor

MillerCoors

MillerCoors added excitement to the beer category this year with its Grilling with Guy program. The company joined forces with restaurateur Guy Fieri to create a customizable program in which retailers could leverage beer-related recipe content from the Grillwithguy.com mobile site. Many grocers created occasion-based displays — some out of the beer department — providing an impulse-shopping and basket-building opportunity. Shoppers could engage digitally in the store on their mobile devices, or through Tweets and Facebook posts by Fieri himself. Some of the country’s leading grocers got on board with the program, including one regional chain that integrated the program into its weekly ad. Another regional chain tested the program during a special burger promotion, and then decided to go full-force after seeing the positive results. In a similar vein, several grocers tied the program into the football season and saw sales in meat increase as a result.

Alcoholic Beverages — Wine
Category Captain

E&J Gallo Winery

As wine consumption continues to grow, E&J Gallo Winery has urged its retailer partners to re-examine their department strategies to ensure they’re meeting shopper needs. To better understand the category, the wine maker conducted the largest-ever study on optimizing the retail environment for beverage alcohol. This study examined every aspect of beverage alcohol strategy, from department location and configuration to display optimization and cross-merchandising. Gallo found that the wine department performs best when configured in a store-within-a-store format merchandised using multiple gondolas. Meanwhile, one of the best display locations for wine is the produce department, due to the heavy cross-purchasing behavior there. These findings, along with the rest of the insights gained from its research, allowed Gallo to better advise its retail partners. Shortly after the research was completed, Gallo conducted a full chain analysis with a customer, and ended up identifying new opportunities to help it compete more successfully. Gallo ultimately helped the retailer grow the category to capture its fair share of the market, while also growing the important premium-plus-price segment and supporting local brands. In the first 14 weeks since implementing changes, the total wine category was up 30 percent (versus 2 percent pre-test), with average weekly sales growing by more than 23 percent. The department reinvention saw such great success that the retailer plans to continue expanding the concept.

Baby Food & Consumables
Category Captain

Nestlé Nutrition

Nestlé Nutrition’s Gerber brand continued to bring category management insights and consumer innovation to the infant nutrition category in the past year. The company released a “Path to Purchase” study to its retailer partners during the second quarter of 2015, summarizing the impacts of mothers’ decisions to shop at certain retailers, buy certain brands and purchase certain product segments. The study included important insights on how moms’ online activity plays an important role. In terms of product innovation, in the spring Gerber introduced new “Lil’ Bits” 3^rd Foods fruit-and-vegetable purée recipes in plastic tubs. Post-launch results show that 3^rd Foods plastic tubs have been more productive than Stage 3 glass-packaged purées.

Baking Ingredients — Mixes
Category Captain

The J.M. Smucker Co.

The baking mix category has experienced flat or declining sales in the past few years, so the category management team at The J.M. Smucker Co. worked to uncover new ways to engage shoppers and reverse the trend. Its research found that baking continues to evoke positive emotions, and that shoppers are motivated to bake for specific occasions. Some of the barriers to baking, however, include time and perceived lack of convenience. Millennials, who account for $200 billion in annual spending power, were a particular area of focus. It appears that this group will require different messaging tactics compared with other generations, as these shoppers have less confidence in their baking skills and don’t have all the necessary tools to bake. While meal solution end caps and displays have been prevalent for years, Smucker’s leveraged its learnings in a new way by creating baking solutions. These solutions can be built around a theme, or can appeal to a more basic occasion such as a homemade snack. Smucker’s research also identified that shoppers seek better-for-you options beyond low-sugar/sugar-free and gluten-free claims, and are interested in simple ingredients. As a result, the company launched the Pillsbury Purely Simple line last February. Since the launch, the products have generated more than $500,000 in sales.

Baking Ingredients — Mixes
Category Advisor

Pinnacle Foods

Suppliers and retailers are facing some important consumer shifts in the baking aisle that need to be addressed. Three of these issues include the consumer trend of cutting back on sweets, the growing popularity of the in-store bakery, and a need for smaller portion sizes (many of the current options are too large for smaller households). Pinnacle Foods, maker of Duncan Hines, addressed these challenges in the past year via its category management efforts. Specifically, the company developed a line called Duncan Hines Perfect Size. The product includes cake mix, a disposable pan and frosting — and its smaller portion size is perfect for one-to-two-person households. Since its launch last May, Duncan Hines Perfect Size has generated $769,000 in sales, with 45 percent ACV distribution. Additionally, it has received tremendous, positive feedback from retailers and consumers alike, according to the company.

Baking Ingredients — Oils
Category Captain

The J.M. Smucker Co.

Specialty oils are one of the hottest segments in the cooking oil category. To further investigate the growth opportunities in this area, the category management team at The J.M. Smucker Co., maker of iconic brand Crisco, commissioned a custom study to learn about consumer attitudes toward and preferences for coconut oil in particular. Through its research, Smucker’s learned that while 27 percent of respondents said they were already coconut oil purchasers, they didn’t perceive that there was a dominant brand. The company saw an ideal opportunity to launch Crisco Coconut Oil. Before the launch, however, Smucker’s did its homework to discover the most popular attributes of coconut oil and to learn more about consumers’ flavor preferences. Last February, it officially launched Crisco 27-ounce Organic & Re-fined Coconut Oil. Retailers have quickly embraced the new item: At one retail chain, since the product has gone into full distribution, average weekly category dollar sales have grown 10 percent, with specialty oils growing more than 13 percent. Crisco Coconut Oil contributed more than 60 percent of the specialty oil growth, according to Smucker’s.

Breakfast
Category Captain

The Kellogg Co.

Kellogg’s continues to lead in innovation and productivity in the breakfast aisle with its work in the cold cereal, hot cereal and on-the-go breakfast categories. Seventy percent of Americans believe breakfast is the most important meal of the day, according to Kellogg’s research. Cold cereal is the anchor center store category in breakfast, with sales reaching $9 billion. During 2015, Kellogg’s identified two opportunities in the segment: driving fun in the aisle and providing more “simple health” offerings. Fun was provided via new licensing opportunities, including Kellogg’s Disney Frozen Cereal. Meanwhile, to address health concerns, Kellogg’s suggested blocking its Origin offerings, along with other simple health products, together. It also encouraged retailers to shelve their aisles by target age flow, which includes Kid Friendly, Family Friendly and Adult Health Central. This approach has encouraged shoppers to spend more time in the aisle and shop multiple categories, including granola, breakfast snacking and toaster pastries. As for hot cereal, Kellogg’s repackaged its successful Special K Hot Cereal from a twin pack to a single-serve bowl, which helped boost unit velocity. The brand also advised retailers to increase space in their hot cereal sections when possible. Kellogg’s continued to provide thought leadership for the small but growing breakfast-on-the go segment, studying how retailers can create an intentional set, improve shelf shopability and develop off-shelf display options. Contributing to all of its breakfast business, Kellogg’s in 2015 embarked on a syndicated data partnership with Kantar, called RichMix, which has allowed the brand to better optimize retailers’ portfolios. Meanwhile, Kellogg’s continues to test virtual technology with its ShopperMX solution.

Breakfast
Category Advisor

General Mills

Ready-to-eat cereal is one of the most critical center store categories, as General Mills sees it. This year, its category management team continued to provide proprietary insights and strategies in distribution, merchandising, shelf work and pricing, while the company made some notable strides in product development to keep consumers coming back for more. General Mills has committed to remove artificial flavors and colors from all of its cereals, aiming for 90 percent completion by the end of 2016. Meanwhile, its employees developed a way to separate oats from gluten-containing grains, allowing the company to market several of its Cheerios brands as gluten-free. In its work with retailers, General Mills focused on the importance of size variety and helped retailers set their cereal shelves according to various metrics specific to each customer. Its new products, including Star Wars Cereal, Nature Valley Muesli and Nature Valley Granola Bites, brought excitement to the category while continuing to drive growth.

Breakfast
Category Advisor

Nestlé Nutrition

Nestlé Nutrition, maker of Carnation Breakfast Essentials, continued to boost the convenient breakfast solution category in the past year. Its iconic brand saw double-digit year-to-date growth, which helped off-set category declines. Nestlé Nutrition demonstrated category leadership through investment in research and product innovation. In the first quarter of 2015, the company shared research results that highlighted key recommendations. Retailers that applied the learnings saw positive category growth, according to Nestlé. Its innovation focused on consumer trends regarding high protein and the need for more convenience. New products from the company included Carnation Essentials Grab ‘n Go! Protein Smoothies and Carnation Essentials High Protein Ready-to-Drink.

Candy
Category Captain

Mars Chocolate North America

Sales of seasonally wrapped confectionery are up 15.5 percent in the grocery channel, thanks in part to the category leadership of Mars Chocolate North America and its retailer partners. Recognizing that two-thirds of overall seasonal purchases are impulse, Mars Chocolate developed a year-long comprehensive strategy, including a one-stop Halloween solution center that rolled out in fall 2014. The solution center engaged shoppers and encouraged impulse buying at the point of sale. Retailers could choose from one of two eye-catching focal-point Halloween display options: a tall spooky tree and a graveyard entrance featuring the M&M’s characters. In total, Mars Chocolate provided more than 7,000 Halloween seasonal focal points. One national grocery retailer saw stores with the displays achieve 4 percent higher unit sales than its other stores. The program was such a success that Mars expanded it this year to include 11,000 Halloween displays in five styles.

Candy
Category Advisor

The Hershey Co.

One of Hershey’s major category management initiatives this year was a new holistic merchandising solution designed for self-checkout. The company developed and tested the initiative at a regional grocery chain, and has since scheduled a full rollout at the retailer’s other stores for 2016. In developing the concept, Hershey’s category strategy and insight team leveraged the company’s insights-driven performance model while working in conjunction with its front end team. The innovative solution combines queue lane optimization with point-of-purchase merchandising in self-checkout, catering to the growing number of shoppers who opt to purchase their products this way. Hershey and a rack manufacturer designed the fixture, which adds more than 144 feet of merchandisable space. Retailers can now add such power categories as grab-and-go meal solutions, and indulgent or better-for-you snacking options. The queue lane optimization, meanwhile, creates a single-file line at self-checkout and helps put an end to customer anxiety. According to Hershey, the retailer that tested the solution has continued to see double-digit results across all of the categories merchandised.

Ferrero USA

As Ferrero USA sees it, grocers aren’t getting their fair share of premium chocolate sales. The candy maker set out to change that in its recent category management efforts. Ferrero Rocher’s team approached the challenge with a combination of shopper insights, merchandising best practices, and in-store architecture aimed at driving retail innovation. Its tools included learnings from IRI Shopper studies, as well as path-to-purchase research, retail discovery assessments, and in-store architecture development and testing. The company developed innovative consumer strategies and new merchandising and marketing tactics to promote everyday sharing and gifting sales in grocery. It tested a new initiative, which featured a premium chocolate shelf boutique as well as a mobile gifting display with related items, with a leading grocery retailer. The test store outpaced control stores, with an impressive 16 percent jump in sales. Additionally, retail margin improved 14 percent. Ferrero now plans to share its findings as part of a category leadership initiative called Go for the Gold.

Canned & Packaged Beverages — Coffee
Category Captain

Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA

Massimo Zanetti Beverage (MZB), marketer of the Chock Full of Nuts and Hills Brothers brands (and a private label supplier), saw an opportunity in 2014 to provide much-needed insights and guidance to food retailers, given the unprecedented changes occurring in the coffee category. The company invested in insights focused not only on understanding category and retail dynamics, but also on coffee consumer attitudes and shopper motivations. Its findings became the foundation for a new merchandising strategy. New best practice recommendations focused on three areas: category/product segmentation centered on understanding shoppers’ individual preferences and taste profiles, aisle optimization, and efficient assortment recommendations. One grocery retailer adopted the recommendations in full and rolled out an expanded coffee set, optimized category flow and space allocation by segment, and increased assortment. As a result, the retailer’s overall coffee business grew three times faster than the overall food trade (23 percent versus 7.5 percent) for the 52 weeks ending July 4. Most notably, its largest coffee segment — ground — grew 9.3 percent, despite a 2.3 percent decline in the total U.S. food market.

Canned & Packaged Beverages — Coffee
Category Advisor

The J.M. Smucker Co.

A proliferation of new items in the coffee aisle has made shopping more confusing for the average consumer. Over the past year, The J.M. Smucker Co., marketer of the Folgers and Dunkin’ Donuts brands, set out to make the warm-beverage aisle more shopper-friendly and lucrative for its retailer partners. Smucker’s commissioned several research studies to understand how shoppers navigate the aisle. In-store audits examined aisle flow, space allocation and assortment, and a warm-beverage market structure was developed to understand shopper dynamics. Eye-tracking research was also conducted. Meanwhile, consumer segmentation was linked with household panel data to provide custom retail shelving recommendations. Based on its new insights, Smucker’s saw opportunities to optimize aisle dollar sales and shopability. The brand identified best-in-class aisle flow as leading with coffee, placing complements like filters, creamers and cocoa in the middle, and anchoring with tea. It also determined that coffee should have more space allocated to it based on the growth and size of the business, and to allow for the expansion of new items. Since implementing the research in its stores, one retailer has seen dollar growth increase 3.8 percentage points higher than the rest of the market in dollar sales, and 6.9 percentage points in units. Other customers are beginning to implement many of the recommendations, too, with positive results, according to Smucker’s.

Canned & Packaged Beverages — Juice
Category Advisor

The J.M. Smucker Co.

In the past year, The J.M. Smucker Co.’s Smucker Natural Foods division set out to better understand the consumer decision process in the organic juice category. The company’s research discovered that shoppers purchase organic products for both their perceived health benefits and low environmental impact. The first decision in organic juice, however, is by usage occasion. The three main usage occasions driving shopping behavior are seasonal, everyday and concentrates. Based on its findings, J.M. Smucker developed new shelf-merchandising concepts, end aisle displays based on time of year/seasons, and promotion evaluation based on cross-purchasing within juice. The company also identified different need states of juice shoppers (wellness, authentic and vitamin), and used this data to create an organic juice platform to help educate retailers. This work is helping to drive category growth: In the most recent 52 weeks, J.M. Smucker’s top two conventional retailers have seen increases of 9.3 percent and 28.6 percent, respectively, in organic juice, far surpassing growth numbers in conventional juice.

Canned & Packaged Beverages — Soft Drinks
Category Advisor

Dr Pepper Snapple Group

When a midsize supermarket chain sought to optimize its beverage aisle, Dr Pepper Snapple Group stepped in with a well-thought-out plan that ultimately helped grow sales in the category. The beverage maker worked with Fifth Dimension on aisle optimization using virtual aisle technology, and also employed Kantar’s RichMix for help with assortment considerations. The retailer agreed to let its private label space be allocated based on aisle methodology, which allowed for greater optimization and better assortment across all beverage categories. The categories that received increased space included water, enhanced water, sparkling water, and energy and sports drinks, while private label carbonated soft drink and bulk water space was reduced to allow other beverage categories to grow. Eight weeks after the changes, the test store was up 6 percent. The retailer is already rolling out three more stores featuring the new beverage space allocation and assortment.

LaCroix Beverages Inc.

As sales of carbonated soft drinks and diet soft drinks have collectively fallen more than $1.2 billion in the past seven years, sparkling waters have increased nearly $700 million. LaCroix, a leading supplier of sparkling water, has contributed to this growth by developing a diverse portfolio of naturally essenced flavors. To date, LaCroix has 12 core flavors, as well as two themed line extensions. In 2014, LaCroix released LaCroix Cúrate, combining French and Spanish influences to create a bolder flavor profile. The new product has appealed to a larger demographic and helped increase retailer margins due to its higher price point. The company also recently launched LaCroix Nicola which encompasses the same flavors as a cola without the sugars typically associated with a cola profile. Over the course of the past year, retailers have committed to impressive sparkling block sets, as well as national ads and off-shelf display space, for the LaCroix brand.

Canned & Packaged Beverages — Ready-to-drink Tea
Category Advisor

The Coca-Cola Co.

Over the past several years, ready-to-drink (RTD) tea has experienced a significant increase in popularity. In fact, the category is projected to grow four times faster than the nonalcoholic RTD beverage category as a whole, according to Euromonitor International. One of the primary drivers of this category is Gold Peak Tea, made by The Coca-Cola Co. Coca-Cola has striven to employ merchandising tactics rooted in shopper marketing insights and focused on bundling Gold Peak with food. The company’s research found that RTD consumers enjoy drinking tea with conveniently prepared family meals. As a result, it helped its large-store retailer partners merchandise Gold Peak Tea with meal-specific food items through a number of turnkey shopper marketing programs incorporating merchandising racks, point-of-sale materials and more. Specific examples include a deli promotion pairing a Gold Peak Tea multiserve package purchase with a coupon for chicken fingers, and a “tea season” promotion bundling two multiserve packages of Gold Peak Tea with dinner rolls. These programs have received great feedback, according to Coca-Cola; in fact, one merchandising program at a large-store retailer experienced a 63 percent lift.

Canned & Packaged Foods — Dry Packaged Potatoes
Category Captain

Idahoan Foods

Idahoan Foods, a share leader in the dehydrated potatoes category, continued to drive an increase in category household penetration during the past year by offering relevant new products and aiding its retailer partners in smart category management. The company worked with Advantage Sales and Marketing’s SMARTeam to create a robust path-to-purchase study, which helped it better understand shopper and consumer behaviors. Its new learnings inspired the company to create in-store perimeter meal solutions to encourage basket building and give the category exposure in higher-traffic areas. Idahoan joined forces with retailers and other suppliers to create programs that included dehydrated hash browns with eggs, and flavored mashed potatoes with rotisserie chicken. Meanwhile, the company launched a line of Reduced Sodium Flavored Mashed Potatoes, based on strong demand for a diet-friendly version of its regular potatoes. The new product has already proved to be incremental to the category, with 21 percent of buyers new to the category. Idahoan also introduced family-size offerings in the flavored mashed segment. Further, the company worked with several major retailers this year to update store clustering, improve shopability of the potato category and optimize assortment, among other initiatives.

Canned & Packaged Foods — Dry Pasta
Category Advisor

ConAgra Foods

ConAgra Foods’ private brands division helped the private label dry pasta segment remain steady over the past year, while the overall category experienced a 3 percent decline. The company rolled out multiple solutions, including new recommendations for how to sell better-for-you (BFY) pasta and an analysis of pasta’s relationship to sauce. Its research has uncovered that BFY shoppers represent a cohort of sorts: They may switch within BFY claims (such as gluten-free and reduced-carb), but are unlikely to leave for traditional pasta. Because of this pattern, ConAgra recommended that BFY pasta be shelved near, but separate from, traditional pasta. The company also stressed the importance of assortment in the BFY segment. Retailers need to offer a diversity of health claims but not oversaturate the section with brands and forms. ConAgra also studied the importance of pasta’s relationship to sauce as part of an overall meal solution for shoppers. The company advised its retailer partners to focus on the meal solution relationship to deliver convenient dinner options. Another key insight was that meal solutions can take many forms, and retailers should consider “good-better-best” options based on specific circumstances. An overarching meal solution program, which could pair pasta and sauce with other meal options as part of a shopper marketing event, would fit as a “best” meal solution option.

Canned & Packaged Foods — Olives
Category Advisor

Musco Family Olive Co.

Musco continued to enjoy success after launching Olives to Go single-serve multipack ready-to-eat cups several years ago. The product brings new shoppers to the category: 33 percent of buyers haven’t purchased olives before. Olives to Go also resonates with Gen X and Millennial shoppers who are more health- and weight-conscious. As a result, it now ranks in the top 10 for repeat purchases among all olive items at a major retail chain. Musco also invested in new programs and technologies in an effort to help turn a commodity into a branded — and consumer-demanded — category powerhouse. With grocery stores nationwide, the company kicked out e-mail blasts, website features, direct mail, and offers, some with retailer mobile apps. Musco additionally participated in an SV Linx program for independent retailers with no loyalty programs, as well as a 360 Connect program, and a DeCA digital coupon delivered to commissary shoppers. The innovative packaging format of Olives to Go has allowed it to expand to grocers’ perimeter departments as well: Single cups will soon be sold in the bagged salad area, as well as in grab-and-go deli sections.

Canned & Packaged Foods — Pickles
Category Captain

Pinnacle Foods

Pickles make up the largest segment in the pickle/pepper/relish (PPR) category, but several challenges have hindered their growth in the supermarket channel. For one, there’s been little or no innovation in the segment. Meanwhile, consumer research suggests that shoppers forget to make their pickle purchases or give up the segment once they get older. Pinnacle Foods, maker of Vlasic pickles, worked to change things in the pickle segment by offering Vlasic Bold & Spicy Pickles — a product that appeals to younger “pickle enthusiasts” and “excitement seekers.” The line offers three dynamic flavors — Sweet Heat, Salsa Blend and Sweet Chipotle — in red packaging that differentiates them from the current pickle selection. Retailers’ feedback was tremendous and positive, according to Pinnacle. Since the product’s launch in July 2014, the line has generated $2.7 million of new base sales in the shelf-stable pickle segment. Meanwhile, panel research indicates that 28 percent of Vlasic Bold & Spicy volume is incremental to the segment.

Canned & Packaged Foods — Seafood
Category Captain

Bumble Bee Seafoods

Bumble Bee Seafoods brought innovation to the canned seafood category this year by launching Bumble Bee Seasoned Tuna Pouches and Bumble Bee Seasoned Tuna Kits. After forming a cross-functional internal team and conducting research, Bumble Bee identified the need to bring more consumers into the category | and convert them to lifelong buyers. Working with IRI ShopperSights to take deeper dives into category usage data, the supplier saw that shelf-stable tuna rose to the top as the most viable product. Leveraging research on growing snacking trends, including the demand for healthy protein, the company developed the new products. During the testing phase, Bumble Bee teamed with supermarket retailers to try out product feasibility, acceptability by category consumers and nonconsumers, and product aisle placement using JDA and new shoppers for the aisle. The products sourced 40 percent of the product triers from households that were new to the category; outperformed the competitive set, with an index of 332; and delivered on portability and instant usability.

Canned & Packaged Foods — Spreads
Category Captain

Ferrero USA (Bread Spreads)

Ferrero USA’s Nutella brand continued to lead the hazelnut spread segment in center store, helping retailers to plan for even more growth to cater to loyal Gen X and Y buyers. In the past year, the company delivered on two fronts with both product and merchandising innovation. Nutella & Go Bread Stick quickly became the second-fastest mover in all of spreads. The company supported merchandising by conducting shopper studies to provide learning on how to maximize sales by leveraging shopper insights and best practice analysis to include control store tests. Nutella shopper insights research affirmed that hazelnut is now a mainstream segment, according to the company. Hazelnut is also one of the most productive segments when sales per item stocked is compared. In another merchandising initiative, the Nutella team initiated a display optimization campaign to drive incremental sales of bread spread-related products. The sampling program featured numerous national and store-brand products coordinated by The Wilson Group; participating retailers enjoyed higher sales rates.

The J.M. Smucker Co. (Fruit Spreads)

While consumer interest in products with high sugar content has declined, the desire for sweetness hasn’t — leaving an opportunity in the fruit spread category. This year, The J.M. Smucker Co. has answered the call by introducing Smucker’s Fruit & Honey, a line of fruit spreads naturally sweetened with honey. The company realized that the launch would require a re-evaluation of the current spread set, so it developed a shelving recommendation to capitalize on the growth of the natural and gourmet segments, and also to drive new buyers to the category. Smucker’s marketing plan employed the path to purchase to engage with shoppers at multiple touchpoints. In-store marketing displays and creative honeycomb shippers were designed to drive shopper excitement. The brand also invested in communicating pairings and alternative uses that combine Fruit & Honey with perimeter categories. At one national retailer, Smucker’s category management and sales teams worked to optimize the fruit spread section and adjacencies within the set to drive shopability. In addition to an optimized set, the brand devised a co-promotion with the top-performing peanut butter UPC on shelf to drive trial usage. Ad placement combined with an end cap display helped drive 4.5 percent growth in the category, which in turn helped offset declines in other segments.

The J.M. Smucker Co. (Nut Butters)

The nut butter category has two consumer trends going for it: the increase in on-the-go meal occasions and an emphasis on protein. The J.M. Smucker’ Co.’s Jif brand capitalized on these trends by launching Jif To Go Dippers and Jif Peanut Powder. The Dippers present an all-in-one pretzel-and-peanut-butter snack that can be consumed on the go. Jif’s category management and shopper insights groups used market research to optimize the set and ensure optimal placement for the on-the-go snacking items. The team helped gain incremental placement in snacking aisles and checklanes, expanding the reach of peanut butter throughout the store. Not surprisingly, Jif To Go Dippers have brought new buyers into the category and have driven category expansion with existing buyers. The product has driven 10.2 percent of volume to be incremental to the category overall. Jif Peanut Powder, meanwhile, is a new ingredient that came out of the Jif team’s consumer research. The product is primarily used in dry applications such as smoothies and baked goods. Jif’s research found that optimal placement for the new item would be the peanut butter set. Seventy-six percent of peanut powder sales have been incremental to the category. Jif supported the launch of both new products with strong marketing and in-store support.

Canned & Packaged Foods — Spreads
Category Advisor

Hormel Foods (Nut Butters)

In an effort to meet future consumer demand, Hormel Foods’ Skippy peanut butter brand rolled out the Skippy Natural peanut butter line. The company also employed a new merchandising scheme to improve growth in its brand, as well as the overall peanut butter and jelly category, in a select regional grocery store chain during the first quarter of 2015. At 12 feet, the new and improved peanut butter and jelly display set increased the vertical space allocated to peanut butter by about 2 feet. Specific product additions were based on the latest category review at the time of the proposal, and the new allocated space replaced five slow-moving and declining jam/jelly products with 11 Skippy peanut butter items, including two new varieties: Skippy Natural Creamy and Skippy Natural Chunky. Before the new display setup, the nut spread category at this retailer was down 7 percent in dollars and 5 percent in units. After the new display setup debuted, the 26-week results saw successful metrics and sales for the nut spread category. Total nut spreads increased by 8.1 percent in dollars and 130,700 units, and Skippy products increased by 2.6 percent in units. Lastly, the two new Skippy items added a further $142,000 to the peanut butter and jelly category.

Commercial Baked Goods — Bread
Category Captain

Bimbo USA

Bimbo helped a Southeast regional grocer build same-store sales, using space-to-sales recommendations that yielded overall growth while the rest of the market held flat. A key innovation was the differentiation of premium and mainstream stores. Developing the right assortment on a store-by-store basis allowed consumers to see more selection, while delivering the freshest product available and driving down waste. Identifying stores by different demographics enabled vendors to focus on the main items that are selling for each subcategory. For example, a store with one breakfast/premium assortment will offer the top two sellers in each subcategory, like English muffins and bagels, while spreading out on the mainstream commodity wheat and white bread that dominate sales at this particular store. As such, vendors were able to maintain shelf conditions that consumers and stores found acceptable, while offering fresher product and less shrink. Bimbo also developed buying occasion zones for Italian breads, breakfast breads and premium assortments, resulting in overall sales growth. The retailer has shown major growth in differentiating items such as wide pans, buns, English muffins and bagels. Traditional wheat and white breads are down, as consumers are trading up from private label to branded offerings, bringing up the overall basket ring at the register.

Commercial Baked Goods — Bread
Category Advisor

Flowers Foods

Flowers Foods delivered impactful benchmarking, promotion analysis, assortment studies and outstanding in-store execution. Leveraging the latest technology, Flowers automated the process of generating consistent, store-specific planograms across thousands of stores, using a retailer rule-based approach that allows for accurate, on-the-fly adjustments and provides real value to retailers. With a shopper-centric mindset, company research found smaller households were frustrated with the size of a loaf of specialty premium bread. Flowers saw this as an opportunity to increase purchase frequency and basket size by developing a loaf sized for these households. Last May, the company began test marketing Cobblestone Bread Co. “right-sized” loaves in the Southwest. With fewer slices than a normalsized specialty loaf — and an attractive price point — these loaves are driving specialty premium loaf unit growth and contributing significantly to dollar growth. In September, the availability of these smaller loaves was expanded to Flowers’ entire distribution footprint.

Commercial Baked Goods — Sweet Goods
Category Captain

McKee Foods

Nationwide, the baked sweet goods category is faced with almost flat growth, a result of changing shopper behavior, an aging population and competition from other snack categories. McKee Foods, maker of Little Debbie snack cakes, saw an opportunity to engage Hispanic shoppers, working closely with a major Southwest regional grocer to leverage its position in this demographic. With nearly three-quarters of Western Union (WU) users identified as Hispanic, Little Debbie and Western Union collaborated on a shopper marketing program, offering coupons for free Little Debbie items with each WU transaction, to pull consumers into center store. Results exceeded expectations, with redemptions approaching 30 percent, leading to another partnership centered on Hispanic Heritage Month this past September. McKee’s focus put the shopper at the center of marketing efforts and provided better selling opportunities to its independent distributors. As a result, the company developed platforms to boost its position as advisor to retail category managers in regard to snacking trends, category insights and fact-based solution delivery. As a result of rethinking its strategy for achieving growth in today’s competitive landscape, McKee delivered solutions resulting in double-digit growth for its brand and consistent growth for the category. The process allowed McKee to provide its retail partners with programs that are relevant to shoppers’ needs.

Cookies
Category Captain

The Kellogg Co.

With the $6.1 billion cookie category a bit soft in the past year, The Kellogg Co. focused on introducing seasonally relevant rotations and leveraging cross-category trends that create excitement. Kellogg expanded relevant, on-trend offerings within its portfolio, such as its Simply Made cookies, offering a cleaner label and delivering solid growth over the prior year. The company tapped further trends through co-branding with Jif peanut butter and M&M’s candies. Additionally, Keebler Fudge Stripe Red Velvet and Fudge Stripe Cookies & Crème delivered against consumer expectations for seasonally relevant rotational offerings that provide intrigue and interest, driving seasonal and rotational cookie dollar sales up 76 percent since 2012. Kellogg offered its retail partners category leadership through Nielsen Market Structure Analysis, providing learning on the shopper decision hierarchy, defining competitive sets to address shopper needs and developing a planogram strategy that reflects how consumers shop the category. Kellogg’s partnership with InContext Solutions and its ShopperMX solution allowed in-store visualization and testing. This year, Kellogg began a syndicated data partnership with Kantar that shows retailers how best to optimize their portfolios, and the monetary benefits of adding and removing items.

The Kellogg Co.

The Kellogg Co. demonstrated leadership in the cracker category, whether a mature segment like pantry crackers (down just less than 1 percent in the last year) or a more on-trend one like on-the-go products (up nearly 2 percent). In the pantry, Kellogg focused on category-first solutions that leveraged artisanal cuisine influences and expanded hand-to-mouth snacking. Its retailer partners had growth rates that outpaced center store and the total market by overindexing in shelf space and sustainable innovation, dominated by trendy varieties like focaccia, Tuscan cheese, rosemary and olive oil, pita, flatbread, and pretzel crisps. For portable snacking, Kellogg used insights and trend-driven focus to identify expansion opportunities, and leveraged occasion-based solutions to deliver incremental purchases. Kellogg contributed to category growth through food solutions that meet multiple daypart needs. At key retailers, Kellogg conducted in-store tests to expand the “in-and-out” purchase, including store-within-a-store concepts and checklane solutions; innovative rack and dump-bin vehicles within the perimeter allowed retailers to place high-penetration immediate consumables like its On The Go Cups in an organized manner. Kellogg also conducted research to develop an on-the-go segment across core categories of cookies, crackers and snacks. This new understanding will be used to aid in the launch of innovative items to meet a growing consumer need.

Free-from Foods
Category Captain

Enjoy Life Foods

Annual sales growth of 50 percent is a stellar achievement, and it’s what Enjoy Life Foods helped deliver for its retail partners in the free-from food category, which is truly on fire. Acquired earlier this year by Mondelez International, Enjoy Life developed a symbiotic relationship among its brand, shoppers and retail partners by being transparent with consumers on the products it produces, reactive to consumer feedback to improve those products, and forward-thinking to make products more accessible in a category that was launched based on exact needs. Offering more than 50 products across eight categories, Enjoy Life used a shopper-centric strategy focused on its allergen-sensitive target consumer. The company used a combination of analog and digital tools to provide information about ingredients, product variety, and cutting-edge technology like geolocation partnerships to help drive traffic to Enjoy Life retailers, ultimately lifting total basket ring.

Gum
Category Captain

Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co./Mars Chocolate North America

Wrigley and its parent company, Mars, drove innovation and profits for retailer partners looking to revamp their front ends for maximum impact. With household penetration of gum declining, Wrigley sought to stress the fun element of chewing with line extensions to its iconic Juicy Fruit brand, adding Starburst candy flavors and Fruity Chews in convenient car-cup packaging that helped boost gum usage among under-25s. Research showed shoppers were ultimately not purchasing impulse items at checkout because they weren’t top of mind. The answer: an innovative LED display, now in more than 3,500 grocery stores, that drove both conversion and dollar sales increases of about 10 percent for the total category. Wrigley used a new methodology that was able to get at individual shopping occasions in a select retailer/channel so that decisions and trade-offs on a given shopping trip were captured. The consumer was placed in the context of shopping in a virtual environment with specific assortments. The discovery: Flavor territories were a key decision at shelf for both immediate and future consumption. Further, Wrigley developed a strategic approach for retailers to maximize sales in transaction zones to offer choices that reward shoppers for finishing the errand, refresh them after a long day and remind them to grab a forgotten item — thus driving growth by increasing sales of impulse items to more shoppers.

Snacks — Meat Snacks
Category Captain

Jack Link’s

Meat snacks are hot, with 11 percent growth in the past year, and Jack Link’s is leading the way. With a dedicated business team focusing on category management, business analytics, shopper insights and consumer insights to ensure that retailers nationwide are making the best decisions for their meat snack sets, Jack Link’s was able to strengthen market share, increase sales, improve gross margin, increase return on investment and gain customer satisfaction. Armed with extensive research to get a better understanding of protein snacking trends, Jack Link’s teamed with retailers to expand and grow this dynamic subcategory. It developed custom space and assortment recommendations for the grocery channel, demonstrating that permanent secondary placements drove impulse purchases. With one Midwest retailer, Jack Link’s secured placement on the front end, expanded to restaurant checklanes and eliminated an underperforming subcategory within the salty snack aisle, leading 78 percent meat snack category growth at the retailer, and 19 percent growth in the Midwest. Meanwhile, five additional placements at a Southeast retailer brought a 34 percent sales rise for the category there, and a 21 percent gain for the category within the region.

Snacks — Salty Snacks
Category Advisor

Flagstone Foods/Treehouse Foods

Building on consumer research over the past four years, Flagstone Foods (an operating company of Treehouse Foods) teamed with a major Southeast regional grocer with a strong desire to focus and reinvent its existing private-brand trail mix business. Using its category segmentation and insights work, Flagstone urged a base assortment recommendation that included a two-tiered assortment consisting of both the regular private brand and a premium label. Accordingly, the retailer created a more prominent trail mix section adjacent to the snack nut section and supported the category with temporary price reductions, features and display merchandising, including the use of shippers. As a result, category sales experienced double-digit growth, while sales of private label hit triple digits, bringing an overall fourfold increase in share of category. Flagstone’s insight-driven innovations drove revenue and profit.

Toaster Pastries
Category Captain

The Kellogg Co.

The Kellogg Co. is a giant in this $815 million category with its iconic Pop Tarts line. Innovation was a key strategy for success over the past year, with new products drawing households to the category and many adding them to their everyday purchases. Kellogg demonstrated that households that purchase both innovation and core spend more than twice as much as those that just buy core. The company used line extensions and limited editions to remind lapsed users about the category through exciting new flavors and food news. New platforms, such as a Peanut Butter and Jelly Pop Tart, recruited new households by addressing unmet needs or barriers to consumption. Kellogg refreshed packaging to improve findability at shelf, increased displays and established four key principles for shelf success that had retailers who employed them outpacing category velocity. Shopper insights partnerships with Kantar RichMix and InContext Solutions further allowed Kellogg to remain a leader in the category.

GROCERY —— NONFOODS

Laundry Detergent
Category Captain

Seventh Generation

Leading green manufacturer Seventh Generation helped a national retailer revise its existing shelf merchandising strategy to better meet consumers’ needs and drive category sales performance. Consumer research and sales performance data revealed a need for more laundry detergents that cater to people with sensitive skin. Over the past four years, the “free-and-clear” segment has grown 2.5 percent, while the overall category has declined 2.1 percent. A separate analysis of natural laundry shoppers’ purchase transactions indicated that the purchase overlap of natural brands — such as Seventh Generation — is higher with free-and-clear versions of conventional laundry detergent brands. Seventh Generation began changing its on-pack labels to emphasize the benefits of free and clear; then it worked directly with one of its retailer partners to improve the laundry detergent planogram. The change involved grouping the two leading natural laundry detergents together with the leading mainstream premium brand, which included some of the mainstream free-and-gentle laundry detergents. Since the retailer made the change, green liquid laundry detergent sales have grown 17 percent over last year, with Seventh Generation driving the growth, at 20 percent.

Pet Care
Category Captain

Nestlé Purina Pet Care

As the leading pet care company in U.S. supermarkets, Nestlé Purina Pet Care provided dedicated category management experts to work with customers across the country in testing and implementing new growth strategies. Its customer teams focused on such areas as collaborative joint business planning and joint scorecarding, consumer segmentation, category segmentation, consumer/shopper insights, and custom planogram work, among others. The company also helped its retailer partners with pricing strategies and merchandising tactics, including store-within-a-store concepts. On the product innovation front, Nestlé Purina launched such important items as Purina One Beyond, Cat Chow Naturals, Cat Chow Indoor, and Dental dog and cat treats. Its efforts seemed to pay off: The pet category is now worth more than $57 billion annually, and continues to grow.

FROZEN FOODS

Breakfast
Category Captain

The Kellogg Co.

Breakfast is buttressing an otherwise flat frozen aisle by delivering innovation and convenience, with The Kellogg Co. as the leader. Its strategy this past year was about building on a foundation of insights to bring strong growth plans to retail customers. Eggo, a pillar brand for the category, represented the point of entry, with the highest trial and a balanced portfolio to meet a diverse consumer group with both carrier and prepared entrée SKUs. Kellogg’s investment in aisle insights supported a series of shelving principles that were commercialized across retailers to best meet the needs of the frozen breakfast shopper and drive an incremental lift in sales. Coupling aisle insights with specific shopper affinities by account allowed for local relevance and partnering to build assortment and shelving plans. Innovations like Special K savory handhelds fueled double-digit growth in the entrée segment. Kellogg continued to demonstrate category leadership by investing in shopper, consumer and department-led insights, including a Millennial attitude and usage study, a parents study to understand the weekday breakfast occasion, and an annual insights review to demonstrate occasion and consumption insights relevant to the category.

Ice Cream & Novelties
Category Captain

Unilever USA

Growth returned to the ice cream category, driven by the superpremium segment in both packaged ice cream and frozen novelties, and Unilever led the way in both. With a softening in better-for-you demand and a greater desire for real, less complicated ingredients, brands like Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers Gelato Indulgences and Talenti drove volume growth. Innovations such as Cookie Core, “Double Dipped” technology and Popsicle Mystery Middles, and co-branding with Tootsie Roll candy and Disney’s “Frozen,” created excitement in the category. Unilever continued to expand superpremium shelf space in both novelties and packaged ice cream to capitalize on the strong trajectory of this pricing segment. In the Northeast, Unilever created and executed the concept of “Bring the Ice Cream Truck Home” for its Good Humor brand, with bright-red in-store visibility vehicles and the best-selling out-of-home SKUs offered in an in-home multipack. Other in-store visibility initiatives were pushed across several retailers, with strong results, making ice cream as fun to shop as it is to eat. Unilever continued to move the category forward with great innovation, shelving solutions and exciting in-aisle executions.

Meat Substitutes
Category Captain

The Kellogg Co.

As the brand leader in this growing category, Kellogg was actively engaged in driving its evolution from meat substitutes to veggie cuisine with plant-based protein through innovation with a broader range of veggie foods that appeal to both meat reducers and healthy lifestyle seekers alike. Kellogg positioned itself as the category leader by pioneering in-aisle solutions in regard to merchandising meat substitutes adjacent to natural/organic and gluten-free, versus as a stand-alone category adjacent to various less relevant categories. The strategy was built around driving traffic and inspiration for shoppers who traditionally have viewed frozen as not having options for them, because of its perceived lack of health credentials. Retailers that adopted a Healthy Living destination within frozen experienced category velocities greater than those that maintained the stand-alone category. Kellogg invested significantly in research and insights to drive the category, including structural and package graphic updates for better perceptions of taste, health and brand equity; an online community of category consumers to keep track of consumer interests; a study of barriers to entry; and research into which foods are most likely to be swapped for meat substitutes and frozen veggie products.

Meat Substitutes
Category Advisor

Pinnacle Foods

Although the $409 million frozen meatless category is growing, challenges still include mainstream consumer reluctance, desire for a better flavor experience, and lack of innovation. Pinnacle Foods’ Gardein brand aimed to reverse that negative taste perception while attracting key consumers and helping them move toward “eating healthier, more sustainable proteins,” and thus drive category growth and improve margins for retailers. Gardein Fishless Filets addressed consumer needs for healthier alternative proteins, appealing to both vegetarian and mainstream shoppers. Gardein became the category’s primary growth driver, drawing positive feedback and results from retail partners and consumers for bringing unique and delicious innovation into a growing but somewhat repetitive category. Results indicated great potential for further category growth.

Vegetables
Category Captain

Pinnacle Foods

The frozen vegetable category — the third largest in the frozen aisle, with sales in excess of $3 billion — is the frozen department’s “gateway to healthy eating,” yet consumer perception lingers that frozen veggies are overly processed and lack flavor. Pinnacle Foods worked to reverse this perception with its Birds Eye Steamfresh Protein Blends and Flavor Full lines, designed to up the ante on flavor, attract Millennials to the category and expand opportunities for retailers. Pinnacle’s efforts drove the category into positive territory this past summer; purchases indexed higher among Millennial shoppers, and the new lines drove overall basket ring. More than half the volume comprised new buyers and additional purchases, and one major retailer reported triple-digit lifts. Health-focused innovation drove frozen category sales for Pinnacle’s retail partners.

HEALTH, BEAUTY & WELLNESS

Adult Incontinence
Category Captain

Procter & Gamble

As the population ages, so does the market for adult incontinence products — about 5 percent a year since 2011. Procter & Gamble drove category growth with innovation and merchandising aimed at the key factors: aging, obesity, larger pack sizes and premiumization. Even with consistent growth, P&G leveraged further opportunity to disproportionately drive household penetration: One in three women age 18–75 experience some level of incontinence, but only one in nine shop the category. Products like P&G’s Always Discreet are closing that gap, bringing nearly 3 million new users to the category by delivering a modern feminine solution that women will trust. In the past year, P&G narrowed the gap to one in eight, bringing double-digit incremental growth to the category. Media recognition and consumer support further buoyed P&G’s efforts to drive profits for its retail partners and satisfy a growing demand in a category set for continued growth.

Adult Nutrition
Category Captain

Abbott Nutrition

Abbott Nutrition is a strong leader in a $1.1 billion therapeutic nutrition category up more than 4 percent nationally in the past year and anticipating growth more than double that in the next five years, driven by an aging population, health care reform and healthy-aging awareness. Positioning itself as retail’s best-in-class strategic business partner, Abbott revised a full-assortment model set to improve shopability and lead consumers to higher margin trade-up SKUs, and implemented a new set across all stores through a web-based tool to develop enhanced consistency for customers. Key tactics: locating therapeutic nutrition in the HBC section or next to pharmacy, adding a larger set in high-indexing center-store format stores, remerchandising to clearly delineate brand and trade-up packs, and balancing offerings of balanced, diabetic and other wellness-targeted products. This strategy helped retailer partners outperform the category and post significant gains in market share.

Adult Nutrition
Category Advisor

Nestlé Nutrition

With an ongoing commitment to the category, Nestlé Nutrition’s Boost brand drove category dollar sales growth and dollar share. Nestlé worked to attract new users and grow sales for the category through product innovation and the Boost Great Taste Guarantee, a campaign that drove excitement in the category by taking the risk out of product trial. The campaign was promoted nationally via print, FSIs, website, email, paid search and medical marketing. New items such as the 100-calorie Boost Calorie Smart were based on key consumer insights: interest in fewer calories per serving, and the desire for smaller sizes for those who want the nutrition, but have trouble consuming more than 4 ounces in one sitting.

Diet/Nutrition
Category Captain

Abbott Nutrition

In a $4.6 billion category up nearly 4 percent, Abbott Nutrition worked with a national retailer looking for recommendations on how to become the leading convenient destination by helping customers meet a variety of nutritional needs to live a healthier lifestyle and manage weight through a curated assortment. The partnership aimed to increase retention and conversion, win first purchase, build the basket, enhance shopability, and drive trial and category awareness, thus improving category margin. Key tactics: Expand on subcategories growing the business, such as performance and balanced nutrition; expand on health-and-wellness offerings in high-indexing stores; merchandise multipacks with single-bar options to encourage trade-up; win the peak health-and-wellness season via promotions; capture additional first-time customers with couponing; and align BIC merchandising with vertical brand blocking and clear sub-category blocks, with secondary placement of nutritious snack offerings in the diet/nutrition and snack sections. The retailer had projected a year-over-year decline; instead, the partnership delivered double-digit gains.

Oral Electrolytes
Category Captain

Abbott Nutrition

Oral electrolytes are a $4.5 billion business nationally, with dollar sales up more than 2 percent. With seasonal items peaking during summer and cold and flu season, a national retailer implemented a multivendor modular display program to act as a secondary placement vehicle during peak season, provide a one-stop-shop vehicle and maintain inventory levels. Abbott Nutrition secured dual placement of its new Pedialyte SKU, resulting in significant gains in dollar sales, household penetration and entry of noncategory buyers. Historically, oral electrolyte shoppers were predominantly parents purchasing the item for a sick child, but adult usage has increased 57 percent in the past two years. Abbott’s collaborative merchandising strategy — attract new shoppers while providing a centralized buying location within pharmacy — drove trial and awareness for the category and brand outside of the baby aisle, and encouraged repeat trips. Promotions were further supported by long-term price reductions to support seasonality, and direct mail communications and digital activations.

OTC Analgesics
Category Captain

Bayer HealthCare

Analgesics is a $4.5 billion category; household penetration is more than 80 percent, with consistent but largely unchanged volume and gross margin. While three basic conditions — pain, heart health and sleep — drove the category, Bayer HealthCare believed that, rather than focusing on the conditions themselves, the greatest opportunity for retailer growth across the category could be achieved by focusing on the solution rather than the products. Bayer understood that retailers needed to move beyond the planogram to a 360-degree approach that embraced in-store promotions, feature ads, digital communication and online programs. This approach leveraged cross-promotional opportunities, greater shopper engagement and better overall banner perception. Conducting extensive shopper research and analysis, Bayer pinpointed three condition-based opportunities for retailers to target: internal pain, sleep and heart health, each tied to specific shopper demographics. Results were impressive, with volume sales rates increasing across all analgesic segments during the 30-week test period.

OTC Upper Respiratory
Category Advisor

Bayer HealthCare

There are a number of shopper challenges facing this $7.4 billion category: Consumers suffer multiple conditions when shopping for category products, with many common symptoms; shelves are difficult to shop, with most shoppers having to choose from among 300 items on average, and many outlets offering even more; and manufacturers haven’t helped matters by offering products with descriptions that often confuse shoppers. To bring clarity to the path to purchase, Bayer HealthCare undertook a foundational research study that identified three loyalty levers: ease of purchase, selection and product, and promotion. From this came three strategies: Manage by need state, develop a layout that reflects shopper insights, and provide impactful signage at the shelf. Bayer is currently working with several retailers to test new shelf configurations and signage for the category. Impressed by Bayer’s incorporation of critical shopper insights to enhance shopability, PG looks forward to learning the results achieved by the company’s retail partners.

OTC Upper Respiratory
Category Advisor

Reckitt Benckiser

One in two consumers suffer from upper-respiratory ailments over the course of a year — that’s clear motivation to drive growth in this category. Reckitt Benckiser (RB) recognized the need to find a manageable, strategic way to make the shopping experience smarter and easier. RB and its Mucinex and Delsym brands led an initiative to develop an objective, category-centric future vision and strategy, discovering that OTC solutions are highly important to consumers in the upper-respiratory category, and will become even more important in the future. “The category is very well positioned for continued growth, but it won’t simply happen organically, as manufacturers and retailers will need to partner even more closely to leverage the changing dynamics in health care, shopping, consumer attitudes/motivations, and more,” RB notes. “The shopper journey is going to change, and RB is now working with retailers to share not only what this new journey will look like, but what touchpoints along the way are the most critical to drive long-term consumer loyalty to a brand, and long-term shopper loyalty to a retailer.”

Skin Care
Category Captain

Unilever USA

Over the past 20 years, the personal cleansing category has nearly doubled in sales, to $4.4 billion, but the past year saw a slowdown as the category reached saturation level, as well as displaying early signs of commoditization. Unilever saw the creation of new shower formats and products with additional benefits as the next stage of development. This year, Unilever’s Caress brand launched the first body wash with microbead capsules that release scent all day. The product delivered higher product benefits, warranting a higher price point at retail and creating a premium segment within the category. This innovation brought excitement and awareness to a large yet dormant category, and launched a platform for enhanced benefits that will potentially change the way consumers shop for a need. Teaming with Kantar Unilever’s category management team educated its retail partners, establishing the key growth drivers of the category for the next five years. Innovative items received eye-level placement to encourage trial while disruptive shelving and packaging broke up the consumer’s routine of grab and go. As a result of such work Unilever reported a significant depth of incremental distribution across planograms at its major grocery accounts nationwide.

Vitamins/Supplements
Category Captain

Pharmavite

Pharmavite identified that the majority of consumers who visit the vitamin category are searching for a specific need state that particular products help consumers to address. In response, Pharmavite developed a proprietary need-state landscape design that collapsed the 80-plus product segments into 19 simple health solution platforms. The company also created six distinct consumer segments based on consumer age, gender, attitudes toward health and wellness, and, specifically, motivation for buying, assigned to one of the six consumer segments based on the consumer group with greatest propensity to buy products addressing that specific need state. This allowed Pharmavite and its retailers to position the groups of products that comprise the need states adjacent to one another, to facilitate transaction building. Pharmavite worked with retailers to develop special ad events that proved highly successful in elevating the overall transaction size per purchase occasion, as well as in driving incremental sales lifts not only for the large-count-size items advertised, but also for the nonpromoted small-count-size items within the brands. The large-count-size ad strategy also reduced the participating retailers’ lost category sales leakage to the club channel.

Vitamins/Supplements
Category Advisor

Bayer HealthCare

In response to softening sales, Bayer HealthCare sought to identify and leverage the insights that could help guide future growth and determine path to purchase for the entire category. The single most critical finding was that 89 percent of category purchases are planned before entering the store. Thus, the category can’t rely solely on in-store vehicles or promotions to drive volume; retailers must work with brands and focus on developing not only in-store solutions, but also pre-store, account-specific activation vehicles that can leverage this dynamic. Since this new approach has been adopted, the category has seen a major turnaround, with the most impressive results in the large adult–multivitamin segment. Not only has the category benefited, but Bayer brands have also outperformed these results.

PERIMETER

Baked Goods
Category Captain

CSM Bakery Products

CSM set out to grow the cake category of a Northeast regional grocery chain through buyer conversion in dessert cakes by embarking on an exclusive licensing agreement with The Hershey Co. The weight of the Hershey’s brand, married with CSM’s baking expertise, allowed its partners to offer a differentiating and profitable program to boost incremental sales. The goal was to drive dessert cake dollar and volume growth and grow market share by converting nonpurchasers, while also exciting existing cake customers with the new Hershey’s and Reese’s cake SKUs. The results: The Hershey’s cakes represented a fifth of the retailer’s total dessert cake sales and a quarter of dollar growth, while driving weekly cake sales as high as triple digits over the prior year in certain weeks. The effort was supported by a merchandising and promotional plan that included sampling events, print ads, product demos with coupons, a Facebook post with coupons, and perimeter and holiday displays that were instrumental in driving impulse purchases.

Dairy — Yogurt
Category Captain

General Mills

Yogurt has been one of the fastest-growing and innovative categories in the dairy case as well as total grocery, on track to hit $9 billion in the next five years. Earlier this year, General Mills released a new yogurt category growth story based on category insights that highlight opportunities to optimize the shelf set, assortment and merchandising. The key messages of the category growth story were to lead the expansion of consumption through snacking, wellness and changing consumer demographics. General Mills guided retailers on how to allocate the optimal mix of segments and brands on the shelf to drive growth, particularly as regular single-serve cup sales gained momentum and Greek trends started to plateau nationally. On the innovation and wellness side, General Mills reduced sugar by 25 percent in each serving of Yoplait Original, launched the mousse-like Yoplait Greek 100 Whips, and rolled out Plenti, a combination of Greek yogurt, whole grain oats, and fax and pumpkin seeds. Co-branding with licensed characters added further excitement and interest for younger users. General Mills focused on brand building, gathering consumer insights and innovation to maximize retailers’ space and profits.

Deli — Prepared Foods
Category Captain

Tyson Foods Inc.

Strategy Shopper Planning at Tyson is an integrated discipline using consumer and shopper insights to connect emotionally with shoppers to better meet their needs along the decision journey, inspiring them to purchase and grow this category. This tactic leverages a deep understanding of pre-shop, shop and post-shop behavior to influence consumers, creating better solutions and enhancing the shopping experience, and resulting in increased sales, category loyalty and an overall stronger retail partnership. A recent retailer campaign was designed to increase awareness and drive traffic while leveraging a larger total-store theme. By creating synergies to the total store strategy and branding the category materials appropriately, the campaign consistently exposed shoppers to the category, regardless of the department. The effort also featured a strong out-of-store presence: local radio and billboards, plus digital components like Pandora and Twitter. Further analysis revealed additional opportunities that were addressed by launching new regional product options. Marketing tactics generated millions of impressions, while the total campaign generated a significant sales increase and reversed a two-year sales decline in the category.

Deli — Meat
Category Captain

Hormel Foods

Faced with a declining service deli category, Hormel Foods worked with a retailer to emphasize premium private labels and remove duplication from the category assortment. Comparative rest-of-market analysis revealed opportunity gaps in a premium private label segment. Additionally, premium shoppers demonstrated the most loyalty to the service deli department. Hormel looked at market-level and store data to identify gaps in the category, as well as consumer trends to develop its strategy. Accordingly, the company focused on premium offerings and priced them in line with branded offerings. The team also reduced branded items and continued its evolution of inventory in the set to reduce markdowns and increase labor efficiencies and clarity of assortment for customers. Data revealed that the deli meat category was experiencing double-digit declines, with a significant loss in profits. Hormel aligned multiple strategies to improve overall shopability, increase sales and productivity, and reduce shrink. Strategies included tightening up clusters for localized inventory to reduce markdowns and, essentially, putting the right products in the right stores in the right amounts. While assortment was reduced by 10 percent, sales trends climbed 4 percent to 6 percent and shrink improved by up to 150 basis points.

Heat-and-eat Entrées
Category Captain

Hormel Foods

Following a major company’s pullout from the heat-and-eat category, a large Western retailer asked Hormel Foods to demonstrate why heat-and-eat was still a viable category and to provide a solution for the category’s growth. By leveraging data and insights such as the retailer’s internal shopper data, IRI data and macrotrend reports on consumer habits, Hormel developed the first standardized planogram for the refrigerated food category, and initiated assortment and positioning changes to help close the opportunity gap. With this schematic development, the company expanded the assortment of its products for the retailer, as well as in the whole category. Product expansion resulted in a 12.6 percent increase in sales for the heat-and-eat category, as well as a 75 percent increase in Hormel’s entrée sales. The company identified an approximately $600,000 opportunity in the poultry entrée protein segment for assortment optimization, and redesigned the planogram to improve the set flow, creating cleaner blocks for barbecue, traditional entrées and ethnic varieties. By bringing in new items the retailer hadn’t carried in the past, Hormel gained new distribution on four entrée items.

Refrigerated Pasta & Sauces
Category Advisor

Rana Meal Solutions

Rana Meal Solutions offered an improved value proposition by including a range of category-leading flavors, each one distinguished by the use of premium ingredients, and combined this with a selection of unique varieties to expand the reach of the refrigerated pasta and sauce category. In 2015, the company began to complement its award-winning in-store demo experience with more broad-based 360-degree marketing events, meal solution programs and retailer-specific programs. The Summer of Pesto event was grounded in the insights gleaned from focus groups that pesto is highly versatile when used as a “secret ingredient” to differentiate or enhance a wide range of foods. The program included a new larger-size pesto product, a free-standing insert, digital couponing, retailer promotions, recipes at the shelf and online, website and social media announcements, and television PR support. A program with similar levels of support subsequently launched in October 2015. This approach to the category resulted in tremendous in-market success: Rana continued to drive category growth in both the pasta and sauce segments at rates double that of all other retailers, according to IRI data for the 24 weeks ended Aug. 9, 2015.

Refrigerated Salad Dressings
Category Advisor

Litehouse Foods

Litehouse Foods continued to lead the booming refrigerated dressing category, which boasts sales of nearly $340 million and 5 percent annual growth, through innovations in products and in-store merchandising. Responding to consumers’ demands for healthier, “cleaner” foods for themselves and their families, and corresponding sales increases for foods with natural/organic, non-GMO and gluten-free label designations, Litehouse introduced extensions, revamped its organic line, introduced a clean-label dressing and added flavors to its industry-leading products. The company didn’t take a blanket approach to its customers; rather, it worked market by market, store by store, to customize its product offering to the unique needs and tastes of consumers. Its goal was always to support not just sales of its products, but also the entire produce category. Over the past year, Litehouse dollar sales grew by 9.5 percent, and its ACV by an incremental 2.7 percent. Keeping the shelf fresh with innovative flavors, packaging with a new look and feel, and cross-promotions helped keep the refrigerated dressing category as fresh as the produce that Litehouse’s products sit next to on shelf, while its consumer-driven promotions throughout the year engage consumers, offering new recipe ideas and highlighting versatility through its products.

Superpremium Juice
Category Advisor

Bolthouse Farms

The high-growth premium juice category has become inundated with so many new product entrants that retailers have become confused as to what’s considered premium juice, which items to stock and how to set their shelves to optimize sales. Employing key analytical tools such as market structure and source-of-volume studies, Bolthouse Farms provided clarity and guidance to retailers on the evolution of the premium juice category, which splits into two subcategories — super-premium and ultrapremium — while ultrapremium divides into the clean and functional subsegments. Ultrapremium can be highly incremental to the total premium juice category and its growth in the past year was driven by wider acceptance and distribution in major retailers, but bringing in too many items can cause a loss in SKU productivity. Bolthouse is consulting with national and regional retailers on the rollout of ultrapremium items like its newest entry into the clean ultrapremium subsegment, Bolthouse Farms 1915, as well as merchandising strategies across the entire premium juice category.

PERIMETER -—— VARIABLE-/ FIXED-WEIGHT PRODUCE

Avocados
Category Captain

Avocados From Mexico

As the reigning category leader, Avocados From Mexico (AFM) executed aggressive marketing programs to build brand momentum and consumption. Last February, AFM became the first-ever fresh produce brand to air a commercial during the Big Game, reaching more than 110 million viewers. The “First Draft Ever” TV ad was supported by a multitude of engagement activities across social media channels. AFM also leveraged shopper insight and technology to develop such strategic promotional programs as a research tool that segments consumers by avocado consumption behaviors, attitudes, purchase drivers and habits. Leveraging consumer research, the brand rolled out redesigned permanent POS wire-rack displays incorporating simple “how-to” messaging for the storage, selection and preparation of avocados. The mobile wheeled displays also featured a taller bottom shelf for complementary items, while special top-shelf pockets for recipe cards or taco spices further promoted usage ideas. Further, AFM’s iAvocado app ushered the category into the digital marketing age. Thanks to AFM’s efforts, avocados continued to gain dollar sales as consumer interest and consumption grew.

Bananas
Category Captain

Chiquita Brands

During the past year, Chiquita Brands worked to elevate the banana category by re-engaging with consumers. In September 2014, the brand launched the Cooking Lab Recipe Contest to encourage consumers to create their own Chiquita banana recipes. Chiquita supported retail partners with a dedicated campaign microsite, in-store marketing materials, a sweepstakes, online and mobile advertising, and PR campaigns, as well as a tailored Cooking Lab option that could include a retailer’s own chef, nutritionist and predetermined ingredients. One retail partner in this promotion outpaced the remaining market by 12.1 percentage points in banana dollars and 16.4 percentage points in volume. Seeking new partnerships between bananas and other products/brands, Chiquita commissioned a total store connectivity study from Nielsen in late 2014. The study, which found that bananas are one of the most connected fresh categories in the store — they’re strongly linked to 135 categories representing 63 percent of total store dollars, and span 12 departments — helped Chiquita create a broad but focused approach to meet consumer priorities regarding breakfast, snacking and healthy eating by leveraging bananas’ proximity to other produce, their connectivity with occasion-specific items across the store, and their trip and buyer connection.

Berries
Category Captain

Dole Fresh Vegetables

Leveraging insights gleaned from a study on the berry variety buyer, Dole’s category development team helped retailers surpass national growth in berries by up to 12 points, securing additional weeks of feature support. Other retailers exceeded national growth in berries by more than six points with incremental ads for raspberries and blackberries, according to IRI. Dole’s study helped its retail partners change how they write circular ads: Instead of running singular-focused berry ads, they targeted multi-berry buyers with ads featuring all four berry types, based on availability. Those featuring multiple berries within an ad collectively experienced a 48 percent higher promotional lift, IRI found. Dole also identified the key holidays most effective by berry type, as well as key weeks within a month to promote. These promotion and pricing adaptations propelled new category growth in 2015 after marginal growth the previous two years. Dole’s study also led to new pricing and promotion strategies. The brand teamed with one of the largest U.S. retailers in produce on the introduction of clustering throughout its marketplace. The retailer saw total berry growth of 16 percent in dollars and 5 percent in units after the new clustered planograms went into effect, according to FreshLook.

Cauliflower
Category Captain

Green Giant Fresh

This past summer, Green Giant Fresh (GGF) expanded the cauliflower category by introducing Cauliflower Crumbles to its product line. Recognizing rising demand for cauliflower, GGF brought innovation to the category by addressing consumers’ desire for healthy meal options in a convenient, versatile, ready-to-use form. Since the product’s June launch, total cauliflower sales at retailers that have added it to their assortments are outpacing national rates. Two Northeast retailers saw double-digit gains in total cauliflower sales over the prior year in dollars and purchases since introducing Crumbles; similarly, a national retailer posted gains of 29 percent in dollars and 19 percent in units in total cauliflower sales after rolling out the product. When the item was on promotion, retailers could anticipate a lift of up to 30 percent. Additionally, GGF supported retailers with various premium services, including planogram schematics, category management, point-of-sale materials, and recipe cards featuring creative ways to use cauliflower. To further increase momentum and consumer buzz, GGF worked with a blogger network and employed resources like Green Giant’s and Box Tops for Education’s Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest pages to communicate directly with consumers, as well as using its YouTube channel to post videos of easy-to-make recipes.

Fresh-cut Fruit
Category Captain

Del Monte Fresh Produce

Del Monte Fresh Produce determined that a midsize multistate retailer’s fresh-cut fruit category sales for the year were down more than 10 percent in both dollars and units. The sales decline could be attributed to a lack of adequate personnel, resulting in out-of-stocks, inconsistent product quality and a lack of category support. Over the past year, Del Monte Fresh helped the retailer transition to a new fresh-cut program, advising on item selection and matching best-sellers with similar Del Monte items, based on variety and size; using IRI syndicated data to identify the best-selling items in the market to ensure that the fresh-cut fruit product mix was optimal; and employing Nielsen’s Spectra target segmentation tool to identify stores with the greatest sales potential and to customize planograms for select stores. The new program paid of for the retailer, as the category experienced sustained growth in its stores. Product quality remained consistent and out-of-stocks were reduced considerably. Dollar and pound sales were up 8.1 percent and 8.7 percent, respectively, through eight periods, and sales continued to increase steadily over last year. Finally, greater monitoring of store-by-store sales and inventory helped to lower the retailer’s cut-fruit shrink rate by nearly one percentage point.

Fresh-packed Vegetables
Category Advisor

Dole Fresh Vegetables

Dole teamed up with retailers to position itself for the emerging “darker greens” that consumers are demanding. To that end, the company worked with retail partners to identify and provide solutions to maximize “darker greens power” products optimizing health benefits, including broccoli, kale, spinach, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. Additionally, being able to supply retail partners with flexible order guidelines and delivery procedures paid dividends for Dole’s partners, which experienced significant growth in dollars and pounds compared with their competitive landscape: One major retailer was able to increase commodity vegetable purchases by 12.9 percent from a year ago. A key challenge for commodity vegetables was to keep up with consumer demographics to sustain year-over-year growth. This ongoing generational shift resulted in retailer and grower portfolio adjustments toward Generation X and Millennial consumers. Over the past year, collaborating with individual retailers provided valuable insights for Dole, helping it readjust its portfolio of new product launches aimed at Gen Xers and Millennials. While Dole had a great year in 2015 with commodity vegetables, its focus continued to be on discovering valuable insights that provided retail solutions, thereby accelerating sales and profit performance.

Mushrooms
Category Captain

Monterey Mushrooms

A Monterey Mushroom customer, located in a highly competitive Southwest market, wanted to increase existing customers’ transactions across the store. After Monterey fine-tuned its assortment, setting everyday retail prices and implementing a promotional strategy that rotated all items over an eight-week period, the retailer saw units increase 7.1 percent, total category pounds rise 10.1 percent and sales go up 3.5 percent, while category shrink dollars fell 23.8 percent versus the prior year. Another customer, in the West, wanted to maximize category sales and profits so it could support other department promotions. Monterey’s promotional strategy grew category sales 7.2 percent, category net profits 7.9 percent, category units 4.3 percent and category pounds 6.6 percent. A third customer, in the South Central region, wanted to grow organics to 15 percent without sacrificing category profits. Monterey helped the retailer increase organic mushroom sales from a 3.6 percent to an 8.1 percent share of category sales, while sales rose 8.8 percent; net profit, 9.2 percent; units, 3.1 percent; and pounds, 5 percent. Although the last 52 weeks ended with an average of 8.1 percent of organic sales, the last three periods showed organic share of the category at 15 percent and above.

Packaged Salads
Category Captain

Dole Fresh Vegetables

In 2015, Dole drove packaged salad dollar and unit growth of 6.6 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively. The company’s exclusive retail partners experienced significant category growth of 11 percent, driven by high Dole conversion rates. For national retailers, Dole’s dedicated teams provided localized support to leverage insights to drive retailer business decisions, helping its partners attain double-digit category growth rates. For example, category development and shopper marketing employed internal shopper data to drive targeted consumer marketing programs that had a significant impact on category results, with up to 39 percent higher redemption rates driving increased frequency. Dole’s regional retail partners outpaced competitive dollar and unit trends by 0.9 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively. At one Western regional retailer, Dole teamed with a refrigerated dressing company to grow sales and baskets, boosting the retailer’s overall salad category, driving the Dole brand and increasing sales of refrigerated salad dressings over last year. For its wholesale partners, Dole recognized that the “One Dole” approach (sales/category development/shopper marketing) could better engage independent chains to maximize performance and efficiency. At one Midwestern independent retailer, Dole grew both brand and category sales by double digits, while average independent growth was 8.7 percent.

Packaged Salads
Category Captain

Fresh Express

Fresh Express launched three Healthy Plus Salad Kits this year, each of which delivers on such relevant functional benefits as heart health, digestive health and antioxidant therapy. Results indicated that these SKUs helped fuel accelerated and incremental growth within the bagged salad kit segment. Among retailers carrying all three SKUs, segment sales were up 40 percent, assortment expanded 34 percent, and overall velocities improved 38 percent, according to IRI. Also this year, Fresh Express introduced the Greek Yogurt Caesar Kit; with $2 million-plus in sales so far, this item helped drive solid incremental consumption without significantly affecting sales of existing Caesar Kits, which continued to enjoy double-digit growth. Additionally, Fresh Express built a set for an independent regional account that offered the following improvements: All organic products — salads and other produce — were grouped together, creating a one-stop shop for organic shoppers; similar types of salad items were grouped better, so shoppers had less searching to do; and space was expanded for top sellers and contracted for slower-moving items. These efforts boosted the retailer’s category dollar sales by 16.7 percent year over year — almost twice the U.S. growth rate of 8.6 percent for the same period.

Pears
Category Advisor

Pear Bureau NW

Pear Bureau NW’s domestic marketing team coordinated promotional activities with retailers throughout the United States and Canada. At the beginning of each pear season, the bureau’s managers analyzed individual retailers’ pear category performance, and then met to create uniquely tailored and effective season-long promotions. The agreements were customized to fit the bureau’s crop manifest, which included improving the total category through expanded variety and size (like small fruit for 2015–16) and creating a season-long outlook with the buyers, and also covered cooperative advertising, sampling activities, display contests, cross-merchandising and joint promotions, as well as training, education and support for all pear needs. Seasonal promotions were set up during the year to capitalize on market opportunities. Two of the bureau’s leading retailers increased sales by 40 percent by following its best practices: offering an assortment of sizes and varieties, including bagged pears; incorporating conditioned fruit, which can increase sales by as much as 19.5 percent, based on the bureau’s retailer data; holding bureau-sponsored sampling events; and setting up cross-merchandising and secondary displays.

Potatoes
Category Captain

United States Potato Board

To grow category sales, the United States Potato Board (USPB) developed a nine-month category optimization (CO) program, in partnership with selected retailers, to adopt best practices and measure sales results. During the latest CO program, the USPB worked with a retail partner from May through November 2014 on in-store signage, recipe cards, circular ads, deli and bulk potato promotions, and in-store demonstrations. Overall market share and velocity for bulk potatoes in test stores increased significantly during the promotion. Bulk potato market share increased by 10.3 points, and bulk potato velocity by 34.6 percent; incremental sales delivered were $3,896. Total shopper trips to the potato category edged up by 0.4 percent, and total spend per trip increased $0.06 per trip from the prior year, with trips increasing significantly for smaller potato varieties. Overall, market share gains in the test stores resulted in $16,349 in incremental sales. In this test, marketing tactics that focused on single potato types were more effective at driving market share increases, bulk potato promotions of all varieties were effective in driving sales growth, and featuring potato salads in the deli was effective in increasing sales velocity and market share, especially during the summer.

Potatoes
Category Advisor

Idaho Potato Commission

The Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) continued to provide data, such as recent research it conducted on Hispanic potato shoppers and how their buying patterns are unique in the category, to help retailers enhance their ad plans and show them how featuring potatoes in their produce departments will bring up the entire category. The IPC also created a laminated, double-sided point-of-sale sign to identify Idaho potatoes in bulk at retail, displaying the “Grown in Idaho” seal and the words “Produce of USA.” The sign provided a great way for retailers to let customers know that they were buying Idaho potatoes, even when the potatoes weren’t in a bag identifying them as such. Further, the commission continued to present all retailers interested in improving potato category sales with in-depth analyses. Using proven statistics and pictures from five of a retailer’s stores, preferably with five distinct potato sets, the IPC analyzed the layouts and visited all competition within a 5-mile radius of each analyzed store, and then prepared PowerPoint presentations featuring confidential, no-charge category reviews for the retailers, along with recommendations on how to improve sales across the entire category. Retailers that put these recommendations into practice saw positive results.

Tomatoes
Category Advisor

NatureSweet

Several tried-and-true ongoing NatureSweet promotions included the brand’s SunBursts MVP program, which takes place every January and focuses on healthy snacking with sweet golden SunBursts tomatoes. Springtime provided a focus on salads, with NatureSweet continuing its partnership with Fresh Express to help consumers craft the perfect spring salad while saving money on multiple salad-worthy products. NatureSweet’s midsummer Glorys of Grilling promotion offered creative recipe booklets and an interactive contest encouraging consumers to submit their own recipe creations using robust Glorys tomatoes for a chance to win some Weber grill prizes. The brand’s newest product, Constellation, offers a 24-ounce retail package of tomatoes for every usage occasion. Incorporating five tomatoes — two for salads, one for snacking, one for cooking and one for slicing — into a medley pack to help drive consumer education on usage occasions, Constellation delivers an optimal amount of tomatoes in a format that meets consumers’ desire to enjoy and use the flavorful items.

Value-added Produce
Category Captain

Mann Packing Co.

Noting that Mann’s Sugar Snap Peas is the No. 1 vegetable segment in the Central U.S. region, a prominent retailer in the region leveraged Mann’s expertise to grow its overall category by focusing on snap pea sales. Mann’s growth strategy was to provide a comprehensive snap pea assortment that could apply to all usage, meal occasions and household sizes. By adding a larger-size snap pea SKU, the retailer added 16 percent of incremental revenue to its snap pea business. The higher-dollar-ring 32-ounce item increased the overall dollar value of each basket, boosting overall profitability. Thus, the retailer outpaced the rest of its market in snap peas and overall category growth. Additionally, a prominent Great Lakes retailer transitioned its private label items to Mann’s Family Favorites. By creating clear segment and brand block areas for the new shelf set, Mann’s improved its look and overall consumer appeal. Mann’s also increased product diversity by adding to the set’s organic selection. The retailer’s organic share of business is now double the rest of its market and growing twice as fast. Also, new innovative products such as Mann’s Culinary Cuts, Power Blend and Kalettes, the last a natural kale/Brussels sprouts hybrid, have launched.

Value-added Produce
Category Advisor

Stemilt Growers LLC

Stemilt expanded its longtime category management program, FruitTracker, to provide its customer base and the entire industry with category insights in an easy-to-read infographic format. “Stemilt-O-Graphics,” published monthly throughout the apple and pear seasons, and once leading up to cherry season, informed retailers how each category was performing on average in the United States. Stemilt also provided insights and tips for retailers to maximize their categories or, in some cases, reverse a negative trend at their stores before a problem escalated. Additionally, individual Stemilt-O-Graphics went out to retail partners that allowed their data to be accessed by Nielsen Perishables Group. The simple structure enabled the company to expand Fruit-Tracker to retailers that it wasn’t serving regularly before. Using category data for apples, pears and cherries, Stemilt gave each of its retail accounts an overview of its apple and pear categories and how it stacked up against the rest of its market. The company’s merchandising team delivered these insights in person and worked with retailers to strengthen their apple and pear categories through specific promotions and merchandising strategies. Further, Stemilt continued to focus on branded pouch bags through its Lil Snappers kid-sized fruit program and new Fresh Blenders apples for juicing/smoothies.

PERIMETER -—— OTHER

Automated Retail
Category Captain

Outerwall

Last year, Outerwall’s Redbox movie and video game rental kiosks introduced Redbox Play Pass, a loyalty program allowing customers to earn points and rental credits through various activities. Since the November 2014 launch, the program scaled to 2.3 million members by the end of the second quarter of 2015, with results showing that members rented nearly twice as frequently as nonmembers. The newest offering from the company’s Coinstar division, Coinstar Exchange, helped retailers tap into the burgeoning gift-card exchange market. Outerwall also launched successful cross-promotions between Coinstar and Coinstar Exchange services with Redbox, driving incremental business opportunity across the company’s brand portfolio. Meanwhile, Outerwall’s ecoATM service recycled more than 5 million devices — more than double last year’s number — with 2,200-plus kiosks in the United States recognizing more than 5,500 devices. By conducting research, developing insights and working with retail partners to better manage the front of the store, or “post-register zone” (PRZ), which represents an untapped opportunity for retailers, Outerwall’s category management team achieved success: Over the past year, the company’s core business added $2.3 billion to the automated retail sector, continuing to drive revenue in an otherwise underused retail space.