“If you don’t understand the perspective of a buyer, you will never be able to sell to them,” Nil Zacharias, founder and CEO of Plantega and host of Eat For The Planet Podcast, said during the session "The Importance of Collaborating With Brands in Retail” at last week's Plant Based Food Expo 2022 in New York.
Zacharias spoke with Ryan Rogers, founder of Retail Optics, a consulting firm where Rogers leverages his 18 years of experience working at Target sourcing grocery items.
When explaining buyers’ long-term strategies in taking on a plant-based food brands, Rogers noted they often consider the following: “Is this a trend, fad, or is this going to stick around? Where do we head from here? What should we be looking for? How are categories going to evolve? Will there be multiple players in the space? Will the players vary by retailer and sector?” These questions go into decisions to give shelf space to a product, or to collaborate with a brand.
The conversation was geared toward plant-based specialty foods, which often faces additional hurdles due to the category designation.
“People talk about plant-based like a monolithic term,” Zacharias explained. “That was never true, and still isn’t true now.”
This poses challenges, including the fact that it is difficult to place these items in a store, and that many subcategories are experiencing changes that can be difficult for food maker to understand and react to.
The first challenge can be remediated by Roger’s advice to help the buyer visualize the item in the store by including information on what department it would live in, and what products it would appear next to. He suggested bringing your product to a grocery store and taking a picture of it on the shelf with items that it pairs well with.
The second challenge is more difficult to define, and requires expertise, and data to navigate. For help with understanding where a particular plant-based food item fits into the plant-based ecosystem, Rogers suggested working with a broker, who may also help a brand get face time with buyers.
To understand the landscape of plant-based foods today, Zacharias broke down the category into three buckets:
1. Maturing: Oversaturation of products in the category, with clear category leaders that have unlimited growth
2. Emerging: Products with high growth, but it is a “toss up” who will be category leaders
3. Plateauing: Products with low growth, and it doesn’t look like it has long-term growth potential
Both Zacharias and Rogers categorized some product types to fit these buckets. For example, the plant-based burger is maturing because there are two clear domestic leaders (Impossible and Beyond Meat). A buyer at a large retailer like Kroger or Target will be less likely to consider a product in this category due to its maturity. On the other hand, however, chicken alternatives are considered by the two to be an emerging category due to the many options in the space, and the fact that there lacks a clear winner who dominates. Rogers and Zacharias emphasized that the buyer already knows this, so it should inform how brands sell to them, or which retailers a brand should choose to work with.
In a subcategory with a mature market, it may be better for a brand to consider working with independent, natural channels instead of big-name stores; moreover, the specific product’s innovation needs to be made clear.
Collaboration with brands can take many forms, it can help brands and retailers educate consumers on new products, and facilitate product testing. Rogers noted that Sprouts Farmers Market is seeing much success when working with early stage brands to test their innovations, helping to bring plant-based products to the mainstream.
Zacharias looked to the future, asking: Where can collaboration between brands and retailers occur where they currently are not? He and Rogers agreed that small foodservice sections within big retailers are rife with unexplored opportunities, as well as salad bar sections at retailers like Whole Foods which can teach consumers how to use the product components, easing them into innovation.
Related: Marketers Weigh in on Plant-Based vs. Vegan; Kroger Panelist: Plant-Based Meat to Mirror Milk Analogs