46 |^ Progressive Grocer^ |^ Ahead of What’s Next^ |^ July 2019
Category Watch Snacks
about solving small problems for consumers and
those problems present opportunities for food
marketers across a variety of dayparts and needs.Retail Play
With consumers looking for all natural, gluten-free,
non-GMO products, the healthy snacks category
is growing too. So, retailers need to allocate more
shelf space in their stores and give more weight to
the category. Retailers need to support the brands
by pushing for the healthier variants of the existing
products. Even those retailers who do allocate
more shelf space do not mark the categories with
their specialties (like gluten-free or non-GMO).
Retailers should encourage non-GMO, gluten-
free and vegetable snacks in the snacks category.
Better category management will not only help the
retailers but also the consumers who are looking for
better-for-you products.
Retailers who want to grow sustainable sales
and increase customer traffi c need to capitalize on
the important trends. Th e ones who make snacking
easy through eff ective merchandising, pricing, and
promotion strategies that focus on shoppers wants
and needs will help drive sales throughout the
store. Th ere is no doubt that the growth of modern
trade too has helped stimulate a revolution in the
packaged snack food industry in India. According
to Euromonitor, the snacks category is expected to
grow by 14% CAGR during 2015-20 in retail value
terms at constant prices.
But while healthy and better-for-you snacks
are growing fast and there is a huge headroom to
expand the category, many retailers confi rm that
they are also experiencing fl at or declining sales in
many traditional cookie, cracker and salty snack
options. To take advantage of this swing in demandaway from traditional “junk food,” retailers and
manufacturers are now earnestly leveraging the
healthy halo of complementary products. Retailers
are creating a better-for-you snacking center in
their stores, which allows them to bring new items
in quickly. Th e better-for-you snacking displays
are delivering more incremental sales growth
than traditional snacking items and so retailers
are encouraged to leverage product identifi ers
for organic and gluten-free items as a way for
customers to easily identify those items.
To maintain the momentum, retailers are
actively collaborating with snack food suppliers by
sharing current sales trends and data to ensure that
suppliers have the most current data for making
base retail and promotional retail decisions. Th is
collaborative approach also allows suppliers to react
quickly to leverage best-in-category retails and
tactics to drive additional sales.
Retailers and brands should join hands to
promote snacks by helping consumer to shop better
and buy products that suit their taste preferences.
Th is can happen only with the combined eff orts
of the manufacturer, retailer and consumers and
will help pave the way to even bigger innovation
in the snacks category. Today, the faster pace
of urbanization gives manufacturers immense
opportunities to venture into new regions across
India and promote their brands. Especially in the
case of regional players, they are strong contenders
in their home turf to sell their products in the
neighboring states and tier I and II cities. However,
other regions are left unexplored due various
reasons: product awareness in the market could be
weak, consumers’ exposure to the product could
be low and/ or because of logistics issues. In such
cases, manufacturers can outsource their product
manufacturing to a local franchise and then support
it in the marketing activities. Taking such an
approach can help the brands sell their products to
the neighboring markets.
Distribution remains a key component for any
brand; therefore the challenge for local players is to
strengthen their distribution networks and expand
their retail reach. Th e eagerness of companies toWhere trans-fats
and artificial
flavors once
flourished, now
easily identified
ingredients like
100 percent
virgin coconut
oil and pink
Himalayan salt
are making
inroads in
packaged
popcorn and
other salty
snacks.