The Food Marketing Institute (FMI) previewed the findings of its 2012 U.S. Grocery Shopper trends research in a presentation by FMI President and CEO Leslie G. Sarasin at FMI2012, the Food Retail Show in Dallas, recently. Seeking to help retailers shape their strategies for future growth, Sarasin identified and examined the implications of four significant and interrelated movements.

Undergirded by data provided by FMI research partner and global consulting firm Booz & Company, and making use of video, social media, and an expert panel of food retailers, Sarasin’s presentation focused on the significance of the following four trends, laying the groundwork for a broader FMI and Booz & Company collaborative education series in the coming months.

Value-Seeking as a Way of Life

Consumers responded to the 2007–2009 recession by choosing private brands and less expensive food options, making fewer trips and buying fewer items at the grocery store, shopping around for deals, and generally seeking value in their grocery shopping. Interestingly, even consumers in segments not directly affected by the recession exhibited some of these behaviors. As the slow economic recovery continues, research indicates these cost-cutting behaviors are persisting and will continue to do so in the immediate future. This has resulted in a “new normal,” reshaping consumer shopper patterns.

Technology as a Fact of Shopping Life

More than half of all shoppers now use technology either before or during their shopping trips. Much of this activity focuses on “value discovery”—deals, coupons, price comparisons, etc. As technology improves, more and more customers will be able to readily discover the lowest prices for the goods they want. In a world in which the lowest price can be located with a few swipes or clicks, retailers are encouraged to utilize online means to build relationships with customers.

Online Shopping Eating Away at Center Store

More than a decade has elapsed since online grocer Webvan sank without a trace. But online grocery shopping is making a comeback, as specialist online retailers carve out target categories. Sales numbers of these new specialists now equal those of full-line e-commerce grocers. Online “old-timers” also continue to chip away at key categories with simple searching and subscription purchasing. More than half of shoppers buy a grocery category online at least occasionally. As digital natives become household shoppers, this is likely to become much more common, pushing retailers to look for ways to better blend their bricks-and-mortar stores with their (or others’) online presence.

Format Innovation Pointing to New Differentiators

Over the last five years, the grocery industry has added approximately 150 million square feet of new capacity. None of that new space was built by traditional supermarket retailers; rather, it was added by supercenters, dollar stores, drugstores, and other small formats like fresh specialists and hard discounters. New formats continue to expand, making it more likely that tomorrow’s shopper will have a landscape of options to meet any and all of his or her food retail needs. In this environment, retailers will seek ways to differentiate themselves through merchandise selection, value, convenience, in-store services, customer relationships, and innumerable combinations of these attributes.

Save Mart Supermarkets and the city of Sacramento have reached their goal of raising $1 million to reopen half of the city’s 12 municipal pools this summer, they announced Thursday.

Many city pools were closed last summer due to city budget shortfalls.

Donations came from dozens of Sacramento-area individual donors and businesses, including the Greater Sacramento New Car Dealers Association ($60,000), Wells Fargo ($50,000) and Steve Ayers of Armour Steel, “whose donation helped lead our business community,” said Mayor Kevin Johnson.

Modesto-based SaveMart contributed matching donations for the fund-raiser, which began Feb. 14. It also contributed $5 for each person who visited the Save Mart Facebook page and clicked on the Save Our Pool Like Drive box.

Reprinted from the Sacramento Business Journal.

119,000 people in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, California now have better access to fresh and healthy foods near their homes.

The California FreshWorks Fund (CFWF), managed by NCB Capital Impact, disbursed $8.5 million in New Markets Tax Credit financing for tenant improvements and other costs related to the development of a new 42,625 square foot, full-service Northgate Gonzalez Market. The new store also created 122 new jobs.

“It takes resourcefulness, determination, and a whole lot of cooperation to resolve complex issues facing low and moderate income communities,” commented Scott Sporte, Chief Lending Officer at NCB Capital Impact. “In this case, to get healthy foods closer to home for 119,000, it meant combining the resources and dedication of a local grocery operator, a foundation, and several financial institutions.”

This is the first loan made by CFWF, a loan and grant fund that has raised $264 million to invest in bringing grocery stores and other forms of healthy food retailers to underserved communities throughout California. In the coming months, the CFWF is poised to make several grants and affordable loans to fresh food retail projects in California communities with limited access to healthy food.

For this store in City Heights, Northgate Gonzalez Market, Northgate Gonzalez Real Estate, The California Endowment, JP Morgan Chase, and NCB Capital Impact worked together to structure an affordable financing package that met the unique needs of the borrower and project.

“The financing from California FreshWorks was critical to the success of the new Northgate Gonzalez Market in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego,” said Miguel Gonzalez, President, Northgate Gonzalez Market. “The FreshWorks concept is an innovative and powerful way to bring quality foods to underserved communities, and we are honored to be the first commercial partner for this program.”

Northgate Gonzalez Market is a family-owned chain of supermarkets that was started by the Gonzalez family in 1980. It currently operates 33 stores located in the southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego. Northgate’s markets are full service supermarkets, focused on serving predominately Latino communities with high quality produce, meats, and specialty departments serving fresh bakery, tortillas, and prepared foods.

“New Markets Tax Credit financing is a critically important piece to many economic development projects like Northgate Gonzalez Market,” said Matt Reilein, senior vice president, Chase. “At Chase, our focus is to use NMTC to support projects that provide access to healthcare services and healthy foods in low-income communities we serve.”

The CFWF helped make the supermarket possible by providing access to alternative financing options, and offers incentives to invest in projects located in low supermarket access areas.

“Too many California communities have limited access to fresh and healthy food. Today – with the close of this deal – we’ve given an underserved community the chance to make health happen in their neighborhood,” said CEO of lead partner The California Endowment Robert K. Ross, M.D.

Food Marketing Institute (FMI) supports Senator John Thune’s (R-SD) introduction of an estate tax repeal bill today that will negate an unfair form of double taxation that threatens family-owned grocers.

“Senator Thune is a strong advocate for family-owned supermarkets in the United States,” FMI Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs Jennifer Hatcher said. “The estate tax forces business owners to spend their fortunes on estate planning instead of expanding their businesses and creating new jobs.”

Background for Media:

The estate tax poses a unique threat to America’s family-owned businesses. Although designed to impact only the very wealthy, it has just as frequently been applied to the kind of small and medium-sized businesses that are at the core of the U.S. economy. Long considered the most confiscatory tax imposed by the U.S. government, the rate has risen in the past to as high as 55 percent. And it is imposed following an owner’s death, at a time when businesses are most in need of all available resources.

Source: Food Marketing Institute

Beginning March 1, 2012, consumers will have convenient access to important nutritional information about the raw meat and poultry products they most frequently purchase, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced.

Under a new FSIS rule, packages of ground or chopped meat and poultry, such as hamburger or ground turkey, will now feature nutrition facts panels on their labels. Additionally, 40 of the most popular whole, raw cuts of meat and poultry, such as chicken breast or steak, will also have nutritional information either on the package labels or on display to consumers at the store.

“Providing nutrition information on meat and poultry products in the store gives shoppers a clearer sense of the options available, allowing them to purchase items that are most appropriate for their families’ needs,” said Under Secretary for Food Safety Dr. Elisabeth Hagen. “These new labels mark a significant step in the agency’s efforts to help consumers make more informed food purchase decisions.”

The new nutrition facts panels will list the number of calories and the grams of total fat and saturated fat that a product contains. For example, consumers will be able to compare the calories and fat content for ground turkey versus ground beef, or for pork chops versus chicken breasts, right in the store. Additionally, a ground or chopped product that includes on its label a lean percentage statement, such as “85% lean,” and is not considered “low in fat” also will list its fat percentage, making it easier for consumers to understand the amounts of lean and fat content in a particular product. Consumers will no longer have to guess which products fit their diets.

The Federal Register notice announcing this rule was published on Dec. 29, 2010 and can be found at federalregister.gov/a/2010-32485. To see examples of the types of labels consumers will now see, click here.

Since 1993, FSIS has required nutrition labeling for products that are not raw or that contain multiple ingredients. FSIS is tasked with ensuring that its regulated products are labeled in a way that is truthful and not misleading.

Consumers with questions about the new labels or other food safety issues can “Ask Karen,” the FSIS virtual representative available 24 hours a day at www.AskKaren.gov or via smartphone atm.askkaren.gov. “Ask Karen” live chat services are available Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET. The toll-free USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline 1-888-MPHotline (1-888-674-6854) is available in English and Spanish and can be reached from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET Monday through Friday. Recorded food safety messages are available 24 hours a day.

Over the past two years, FSIS has announced several new measures to safeguard the food supply, prevent foodborne illness, and improve consumers’ knowledge about the food they eat. These initiatives support the three core principles developed by the President’s Food Safety Working Group: prioritizing prevention; strengthening surveillance and enforcement; and improving response and recovery. Some of these actions include:

• Performance standards for poultry establishments for continued reductions in the occurrence of pathogens. After two years of enforcing the new standards, FSIS estimates that approximately 5,000 illnesses will be prevented each year under the new Campylobacter standards, and approximately 20,000 illnesses will be prevented under the revised Salmonella standards each year.
• Zero tolerance policy for six Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) serogroups. Raw ground beef, its components, and tenderized steaks found to contain E. coli O26, O103, O45, O111, O121 or O145 will be prohibited from sale to consumers. USDA will launch a testing program to detect these dangerous pathogens and prevent them from reaching consumers.
• Test and hold policy that will significantly reduce consumer exposure to unsafe meat products, should the policy become final, because products cannot be released into commerce until Agency test results for dangerous contaminants are known.
• Labeling requirements that provide better information to consumers about their food by requiring nutrition information for single-ingredient raw meat and poultry products and ground or chopped products.
• Public Health Information System, a modernized, comprehensive database about public health trends and food safety violations at the nearly 6,100 plants FSIS regulates.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Shoppers in San Francisco will have to pay 10 cents per bag and more retailers are now banned from handing out plastic bags under a proposal approved Tuesday by the city’s Board of Supervisors.

San Francisco already bans large grocery stores and chain pharmacies from using plastic bags, which are blamed for clogging landfills and waterways. The proposal extends that ban to restaurants and to gift shops, hardware stores, boutiques and other retailers.

The 10-cent charge would apply to any type of bag, such as paper, that stores give customers at the checkout counter. The stores would keep the money.

The goal is to discourage the use of single-use bags and encourage people to bring their own bags to retailers.

San Francisco became the first city in the country to ban plastic bags at grocery stores and drug stores with an ordinance passed in 2007. Since then, other California cities, Ireland, Taiwan and the District of Columbia have enacted more stringent polices.

The supervisors approved the proposal despite concerns from some small businesses that it could drive customers away.

“The intent was never to nickel or dime anybody,” Mayor Ed Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, expressing his support for the measure. “But if it takes 10 cents to remind somebody that their habits are in their control, I think that’s something we’re willing to consider doing.”

But Tony Liu, who owns four Chinatown shops frequented by tourists, said the charge may be particularly off-putting given the state of the economy.

“Things are different now,” he said.

City officials have been meeting with business owners to explain the proposal. Stores that violate the law would face fines of $100 for the first infraction, $200 for the second and $500 each time after that.

But Lee said at least initially, city officials would focus on educating store owners, not fining them.

The proposal, which would go into effect in October, is backed by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the California Grocers Association and the city’s Small Business Commission. It would exempt the use of plastic bags for items such as loose nails, dry cleaning and bulk candy.

From The Associated Press

San Francisco Expands Plastic-Bag Ban

California Grocers Association President Ronald K. Fong joined First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama and other local leaders today to celebrate the first tangible examples of progress facilitated by the California FreshWorks Fund, a $264 million public-private partnership loan fund led by The California Endowment.

The event featured fresh and healthy foods that will soon be available at an abandoned Inglewood, CA store site that, with the help of the California FreshWorks Fund, will soon become a Northgate Gonzalez Markets.

The Association is one of 20 companies, associations, government agencies and health groups to participate in the creation and launch of the California FreshWorks Fund last summer.

“The California Grocers Association is proud to be a part of this historic undertaking,” said CGA President Ron Fong. “The California FreshWorks Fund represents a tremendous step forward in bringing needed grocery stores to underserved areas throughout California.”

“We are equally proud that one of our valued members, Northgate Gonzalez Markets, is one of its first participants,” Fong added. “Northgate Gonzalez is an excellent example of the type of supermarket that is ready and willing to provide healthy food options in underserved areas.”

Fong also commended the First Lady for her ongoing efforts to improve the eating habits of Americans.

“We commend the First Lady for her unwavering commitment to raising the awareness for greater healthy food access. Her attendance today validates the importance and success of this ambitious undertaking,” Fong said.

But, Fong said, the effort to bring grocery stores to underserved areas is far from over.

“We are far from being done,” he said. “We have cleared one major hurdle with the implementation of the FreshWorks fund, but there is still work to do. We must continue to work together in a coordinated effort to resolve the challenges that stand as barriers to bringing healthy, affordable food to underserved areas.”

Safeway Inc. named Lori Raya President of its Vons Division. Ms. Raya built her reputation as a seasoned retail executive running store operations in several of Safeway’s key operating divisions, and brings to her new role a unique set of skills having cross-trained at a senior-level, successfully managing large marketing units that together represent nearly half of the company’s business volume.

The Senate Republican Caucus, as expected, is starting the new year with a new leader.

Senate Republicans unanimously selected Bob Huff as the successor to outgoing leader Bob Dutton in a closed-door meeting following today’s legislative session. Sacramento Bee

In another development, Assembly Member Luis Alejo introduced AB 1439 that would establish an annual cost of living adjustment for the minimum wage beginning January 1, 2013.

Must. Bring. Bag.

Don’t. Leave. In. Trunk.

A day after San Jose’s plastic bag ban took effect, an impressive number of shoppers were apparently repeating that mantra in their heads Monday.San Jose Mercury News A day after San Jose’s plastic bag ban took effect, an impressive number of shoppers were apparently repeating that mantra in their heads Monday.San Jose Mercury News A day after San Jose’s plastic bag ban took effect, an impressive number of shoppers were apparently repeating that mantra in their heads Monday.San Jose Mercury News A day after San Jose’s plastic bag ban took effect, an impressive number of shoppers were apparently repeating that mantra in their heads Monday.San Jose Mercury News A day after San Jose’s plastic bag ban took effect, an impressive number of shoppers were apparently repeating that mantra in their heads Monday.

Source: San Jose Mercury News