"FOOD 2020: THE FUTURE OF FOOD, NUTRITION & WELLNESS

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VOICES OF INFLUENCE

	A New Global Currency: Food Purchasing Power Will Give Consumers the Control They Seek by Linda Eatherton
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What Food Shoppers Want By Phil Lempert Consumer Analyst, SupermarketGuru.com View Bio

Last year, the average size of a U.S. supermarket shrank to 47,500 square feet from 48,750 square feet a year earlier—the first decline since 2001. After years of building bigger and bigger stores, retailers from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods are testing smaller formats.

What does this mean for food companies? Less shelf space.

So smart companies and their marketers should be scrambling to find the answer to one question: What do food shoppers want?

One answer that came out of the Food 2020 survey was that consumers want to know more. That one answer can open the door to many others. It also mirrors what the consumer panel on SupermarketGuru.com is telling us, too. Consumers want to know where their food comes from, what’s in it, and what the health benefits (and risks) are.

The fact is, while consumers are now the commanders of the new shopping experience, they’re confused. Through the Web, they have access to more information than ever before, but they don’t know what’s right or wrong. And they don’t always have enough information to link the dots from one set of facts to another. For instance, our panel of more than 80,000 U.S. consumers tells us that they are concerned about mad cow disease; yet, they don’t relate it to buying grass-fed beef as a possible solution. The fact is that consumers today do not understand where our food comes from, let alone the complexity of a disease such as mad cow. Brands, retailers and the government need to understand how to communicate to consumers if we are ever going to reverse the trend of confusion.

Today, with more communications options than ever before, companies are struggling to engage consumers. Many food industry executives and communicators still look to handle communication with customers the way they always did. They expect that unhappy customers will call to complain and that the company will be able to smooth things over by sending coupons. But what happens instead is that the complaint against the brand winds up on YouTube.

Other than having their profiles on LinkedIn, many food marketing executives simply aren’t engaged with the social media that are defining the way today’s consumers communicate. This must change long before we reach the year 2020.

Who knows whether the trend toward smaller stores will last, but to make it in this environment and the next, it’s safe to say that a food brand has to really connect with consumers. One clear way to do this is for a company to become a first point of information on the foods it sells—from farm to fork. And food marketers should play a key role in answering important questions and addressing concerns before a consumer is moved to post a video online.

In short, they have to be a resource for giving consumers what they ultimately want: knowledge.