As part of SFA's How I Buy webinar series, grocery buyers discuss how they make product selections, work with makers and distributors, perform category reviews, and more.
During yesterday's webinar, Wendy Robinson, program manager and senior buyer at Market Hall Foods shared how she makes decisions that create a deep impact, and put the customers, and planet first.
“I love buying food. It inspires me and drives me every day to do what I do,” she said.
She broke the grocery buying process into the following three components:
• How do we build a roadmap? “Who am I buying it for and why am I buying it?”
• How does my team select products and how do we do product reviews?
• How do we work with makers, representatives, brokers, and distributors?
When creating a roadmap to buy and present products at a store, Robinson explained that the demographic served by the location is crucial to deciding what to merchandise. “If your customer does not buy it, you’re not going to sell it,” she said. Robinson said that some of her duties involve overseeing two specialty markets and that she stocks items that appeal to both working professionals and home chefs who visit the location.
Additionally, it is important to consider things like community events that can support getting nourishing food into the community, the agriculture calendar and product seasonality, and the promotional calendar. Holidays are also key, especially for specialty food, as they can bring people to the store for very specific products or categories and can support fourth-quarter sales.
“We are a small store, so with a roadmap that considers all of this, it enables me to showcase different products all throughout the year,” said Robinson.
When it comes to selecting products, Robinson advocates for it to be a group effort, encouraging the entire buying team to taste the food and make decisions together. This will help to calibrate everyone’s palates and ensure everyone is on the same page. It will also help mitigate personal biases inherent to product tasting while educating the entire team on what to look out for when sampling a specific product.
Together, the team should consider each product’s full sensory experience, rather than just taste. She suggests asking oneself: “What am I tasting?”, “What does it look like?”, “Are the ingredients fresh?”, “How is the packaging?”, and “What flavors are you getting in the front and back of your mouth?”
Robinson added that the exercise above is also useful when educating employees at the store, as it enables them and gives them the language to sell these products on the floor.
In the video below, Robinson discusses the benefits of educating store employees about specialty products.
To learn more about how Robinson buys specialty products for Market Hall Foods watch the webinar on demand in the SFA Learning Center.
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