Page 15 - February2019

COMMENTS & ANALYSIS
Hard To Pinpoint The Whims Of Consumer Indulgence
by jim prevor, editor-in-chief, produce business
Georges Clemenceau was twice Prime Minister of France, at a time when it was popular to say that the “voice
of the people was the voice of God.” Clem- enceau explained that the task of a leader was to “follow that voice shrewdly.”
Into that one word, “shrewdly,” was packed a lifetime of experience and skep- ticism. And so, retailers and producers both could do with reading a little Clemenceau as they try to decipher the meaning of consumer attitudes toward healthfulness.
When looking at grocery shopping, a Martian just landed in America who got all his information from The New York Times might assume that consumers yearn to “know their farmer,” want to ensure that the supply chain rigorously ensures ethical treatment of workers, prefer organic, local and are rapidly moving toward vegan and vegetarian eating habits.
Given corporate pro les and asked to spec- ulate, our friendly Martian is likely to guess that the largest supermarket chain in America is Whole Foods.
Of course, he would be wrong. By an order of magnitude, it is Walmart that is the largest food-selling chain in the country. The fastest growing? That would be Aldi. These two chains are united by their thirst for the position of low-cost leader!
Does this mean that consumers are not telling the truth? Sometimes. Mostly, though, it is that the answers you get depends heavily on the questions you ask. If you ask consumers questions about food, you learn a lot about the zeitgeist of the age. People speak in an aspirational manner, elucidating values they want to be associated with.
The problem is that there are other things people value. The mechanism in the questions to get at whether a consumer values, say, saving money to take the children on a trip to Disneyland or prefers to cancel the trip to ensure funds are available to buy everything organic, well that kind of trade-off is dif cult to research.
When it comes to food consumed outside of the home, the issue is even more compli- cated. People may well want to eat healthy.
If consumers really live more mindful lives
at home and eat with a focus on healthful- ness, then it is entirely possible that the same consumers will go wild when they eat out.
They may also want to drink lots of alcohol. They may even persuade themselves that medical advice urges them to drink copious amounts of red wine and eat large bars of dark chocolate.
Sharon Olson is a gifted researcher, and she points directly to the fact that eating out is often an indulgence. So, culturally, the question is what do people perceive to be an indulgence. If consumers really live more mindful lives at home and eat with a focus on healthfulness, then it is entirely possible that the same consumers will go wild when they eat out. So, at home it can be a small portion of a poached chicken breast with steamed broccoli, and when they go out it is fried chicken, mac ‘n’ cheese and deep-fried okra.
If the culture has changed, however, it may well be that at least some people would see the fried chicken not as an indulgence but as something fatty and unappealing. We’ve seen cultural changes in what upscale means. In the 1970s, “gourmet” departments in supermar- kets were lled with high-priced foods from Europe in little glass bottles. In time, upscale
came to mean fresh, almost the antithesis of those little glass jars.
More research needs to be done to get a better handle on what consumers see as indulgent today. Certainly, it is true that chefs have moved over to a more plant-centric ideal. Instead of building their dishes solely around the protein of the day, they are using proteins to avor dishes built around the vegetable or fruit that is in season.
The problem is that this is very high-end stuff — and the white tablecloth sector is, maybe, 1 percent of the restaurant industry. It is not clear that these types of offerings — indulgent produce-based dishes — are actually working their way down to the average dinner house, much less to the fast food sector.
Another problem is that an awful lot of restaurants provide fuel as much as food. It is not uncommon for restaurants to serve as a fueling station, with consumers driving through with the kids on the way home from soccer practice when homework is to be done, running through an airport with 20 minutes to eat before you have to board a ight, grab- bing something for lunch so you can still pick up your dry cleaning. In other words, if the only issue is food, it may well be that many consumers will make value-based decisions, but life does not always revolve around food, so people make decisions based on conve- nience just as they do on money.
Produce is very appealing. It is colorful, adds crunch and texture to food. Some items, such as avocados, are wildly praised for their health impact, and all this connects with social aspi- rations that people are expressing in selecting their diets. The challenge for the produce industry is keeping consumers focused on all this, rather than seeing consumers focus on quick, cheap and, sometimes, old-fashioned indulgence.
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