Making new shelf space for produce

Food deserts — areas where a population can’t support a large grocery store and/or nutritious options aren’t readily available — have become an opportunity for major chains like Dollar General, Walgreens and others as local corner convenience stores to offer fresh options for nearby customers. These food deserts can be in both rural areas, where a grocery store isn’t found for miles, and densely populated urban areas or college universities, says Kelly Jacob, vice president of retail at PRO*ACT. PRO*ACT is a partnership of six independent foodservice distributors throughout the United States.

Jacob says this is “the perfect storm” where produce and healthy eating will go hand-in-hand, as consumers are “seeking out transparently made products [for] the younger generation that’s pushing this whole momentum forward.”

Dollar General, for example, has created “Dollar General Market” — a new store format being tested in about 140 of the company’s 10,000 stores. The new offerings include an expanded grocery line, fresh meat and fresh fruits and vegetables. Other chains, like Walgreens, are beginning to follow suit.

Offering fresh options in convenience stores has been a topic of conversation for about 10 years, and five years in the drug and dollar store channels, Jacob says. Highly populated locations like hospitals and airports are also making the change.

But in order to offer these fresh options at one of these smaller locations, a few things need to happen.

First, the transition will incur some costs up front, like advertising to get the word out and additional deliveries. Jacob says stores must be willing to “invest in it until you build up consistent store traffic to warrant the amount of deliveries you really need for fresh products.”

Also, cleanliness will be a main driver for consumer appeal.

“Make your place look appealing like someone would want to eat there,” Jacob says, which entails making sure floors, restrooms and food baskets and shelves are clean. This extends outside the store too, meaning things like removing graffiti and disposing of trash in the parking lot become even more important.

For greenhouse growers, these store spruce-ups mean another outlet to sell product. Jacob believes the opportunity for local, specialty varieties will be in more urban areas — like downtown squares and college universities.

“I really think that’s going to be a huge trend because [people will be] in areas where a big grocery store can’t be because it’s urban…It’s going to have a high-density population, and people are going to shop pretty often and pretty intensely,” Jacob says. “You have to drill down and think about your demographic. Think about where your store is, think about the clientele that you’re building, and then construct a product mix to fit that.”

It’s been a long talk over the past decade, but Jacob says moving to fresh options in nontraditional store outlets is becoming much easier as stores become more customized and information is shared faster.

Because of the Internet, “consumer demand is so much more quickly assimilated,” she says. “I think the trajectory for change is much more exponential, and I wouldn’t be surprised in the next, in my opinion, three to five years, this will be the norm.”