Blog
Learn about big data technology and trends for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) and retail industries.
This week we had a team representing at the Category Management and Shopper Insights Conference, in Las Vegas!! It was an exciting conference with lots of talk of innovation and creative ideas about how to leverage technology across the category management process. It was great however to be reminded at the core, what a fundamental role Category Management plays in the growth of the industry. “Strategic choices made by suppliers across the 4 P's will usually affect the 4 P's for the retailer" Sue Nicholls, Category Management Knowledge Group The video below highlights the 4 P's of Category Management: Product, Placement, Price & Promo. Given all the exciting talk of technology and innovation we thought it relevant to keep our feet firmly based in the fundamentals of the discipline. We also liked the fact that this video demonstrates how inherently collaborative the category management process needs to be. Hope you have a good end to your week.
Share
Retailer Solutions | health & wellness
There is no surprise that consumers are demanding transparency more than ever. When a consumer walks into a grocery store, they want to be catered to. They want their shopping experience to be quick, effortless and, ultimately, applicable to them and their families. So long are the days of shopping for necessity and just picking up bread and butter. Now, it’s about ensuring that bread is Whole Grain or Gluten Free and that butter is Non GMO or Paleo. "Having our dietitians collaborate with a retailer’s dietitians, we’ve noticed great success across multiple programs" Angie Kling, RD, LD, Manager, Food & Beverage Team Label Insight. With so many diets and trends throughout the industry, it’s important that retailers, particularly the dietitians at the retailers, understand how to capture the interests of all their shoppers. We know that most retailers already have a health and wellness program in place, but ensuring it’s differentiated and personalized is one way retailers can stay on top of the trends while still meeting grocer’s demands.
Share
Retailer Solutions | health & wellness
Outside of being so closely attached to product data in my role, about eight months ago, I relocated from St. Louis to Label Insight’s headquarters in Chicago. With it came a new set of regional retailers. I traded in Schnucks and Dierbergs for Mariano’s and Jewel, although I’ve still managed to locate my nearest Target for my extensive shopping trips that go far beyond the pantry. While I knew the demand for consumer transparency and retailer differentiation were both on the rise, I decided to dig into what 2019 and beyond held for some of my favorite retailers (and it wouldn't be a Label Insight blog post without a little data).
Share
New Label | Product Data Management
With the first quarter of 2019 coming to a close, we are less than one year away from the compliance date for large manufacturers to implement the revisions of the nutrition and supplement facts labels. "Label Insight’s database showed 45,691 active products have adopted the new nutrition label on the packaging," Thea Bourianne, Label Insight Solutions Consultant, MBA, RD, LDN The changes to the nutrition facts panel is significant for a number of reasons, but most importantly, it increases the transparency and understanding of nutrients like calories and serving sizes. The new nutrition facts label (NFL) has an updated look with a larger font for calories to improve awareness and emphasis on the calories foods contain.
Share
A lot of news came across our shared news channel this week. And so we've curated some of the items we found most interesting below. To start with there were two pieces of Amazon news that were intriguing. One was a re-statement of the announcement to close the Whole Foods small format stores, and the other was Amazon's launch of their own private label milk products. Aside from that there's some continued news around challenges large brands are facing due to the disruption taking place due to transparency as well as an interesting announcement from Target about how they will offer up an online marketplace for suppliers to sell their products - interesting news considering Kroger and Microsoft's announcement last week about their foray in to Retail as a Service (RAAS). Hope you all have an excellent week. enjoy. Whole Foods to re-brand existing 365 stores - grocerydive.com Amazon owned-Whole Foods has announced plans to re-brand all existing Whole Foods 365 stores as regular Whole Foods stores before the end of the year. Whole Foods will discontinue its 365 small-format stores. Since Amazon took over the banner in 2017, nine 365 stores have opened and enthusiasm for the format has waned. Some stores that were intended to open as 365 locations have opened as standard Whole Foods stores instead, Yahoo reported. (curated by @nicolemeyerson)
Share
I loved this new video. Malcolm Gladwell brings his engaging story telling to the story of customer preference clustering 1.0 which took place in the food industry several decades ago and gave rise to the explosion of SKU's across every category that we now see today. A must view for anyone who has a curious mind. “There's no perfect Pepsi, only perfect Pepsi's " Howard Moskowitz This story highlighted how clustering of early customer preferences lead to a revolution in how we as an industry sold and marketed products. We, at Label Insight, believe we're experiencing the beginnings of a new type of revolution led by clustering 2.0 that will take place in relation to the new attribute driven market. Good video and exciting times.
Share
Sales data powered by Nielsen Product Insider Americans are all about the superfoods. And not only have we added these ingredients into our diets, we’ve found multiple ways to incorporate them in other parts of our lives. We’re well underway into 2019, but we took a moment to look back at the overall trends of 2018 so we can see what may dominate store shelves this year. Americans are cramming in all the health they can into each high-protein bite, meal-prepped lunch, or diet fad du jour. In fact, they’re also taking some of these foods and cleaning with it, and sharing the love with their pets, too.
Share
Label Insight contributes data to articles often, sourced from our platform of more than 22,000 high-order attributes per product across food & beverage, household products, and pet. We're proud to have given a nugget of data to fuel the below Market Watch story, operated by Dow Jones, about businesses leveraging the on-package claim that they're women-owned.
Share
We start this weeks curated list of news with a poignant comment on a post that was produced a while back. The idea of potentially inverting the category decision tree as a response to an attribute driven market is something we've talked alot about and so it was great to see Stephanie Halley, a senior Category Advisor for Mars Chocolate North America talking the same language. Aside from that, there was some news about the future of meat, and the future of scanning for allergies and another development in the Kroger and Microsoft partnership. We wrap up this last weeks curated list with a study about the impact the "women owned" attribute is having on female-led companies - we provided data for this exciting peice. Have a productive week. Product Attributes become key to unlocking growth - bricksmeetsclicks.com a comment on the article: "We are also realizing that laying out a particular category’s aisle based on the purchase decision tree (backward looking as the aisle is laid out today) isn’t putting enough pressure upstream in major CPGs to innovate against shopper NEEDS— occasion based shopping. To effectively meet future consumer demand, we need to innovate and shelve products based on how people use the product. This is the way of the future to be a thought leader with retailers." (curated by @antonxavier)
Share
I previously posted a video on the new Kroger shelf tags here. The previous post was an "early impressions" video with some consumer interviews. This latest video comes from Geekwire via a forbes article and is a deeper dive in to the potential of the technology based on recent showing at NRF's Big Show 2019. “So, wait, you mean you can help me locate the groceries I want to buy with personalized signals of where they are on a shelf as I walk by?” some asked The emphasis in this silent video (i spent 20 minutes trying to fix the audio on my computer before realizing it's silent) is on the potential to interact with consumers in personalized ways and to deliver personalized information. Tieing together the shelf experience, with your personal hand held device and /or a shopping scanner also helps to bring the online and in-store experience together as well. We're very excited to see how this will evolve the shopping experience going forward.
Share
