Are you finding yourself with an abundance of products going to waste each week?
Are you taking the time to truly understand your customers by evaluating buying habits and taking weekly inventory? Sure, super size portions get a lot of attention when it comes to fast food chains but when it comes to products in your MicroMarket, is bigger always better?
With the opening of their 500th MicroMarket, Five Star Food Service is a prime example of a company that understands how important it is to understand your customers. Part of their success stems from their ability to be creative and experiment with different strategies to keep their customers satisfied and engaged. One strategy they implemented involved experimenting with Large Single Serve and Extra Value Large sized chips.
“We initially only sold LSS size chips in our micro-markets, but made a switch to only XVL sized chips to create the ‘bigger is a better value’ proposition based on end-users requests for a better value for their money,” said a representative from Five Star, “Following that, we received feedback from some of our end users that the bigger bags were too big to eat during their break periods and they had nowhere to store it in between breaks. Thus, we decided to bring back the top selling LSS SKUs to test any cannibalization of sales on XVL sized chips. What we found was that not only did XVL sales remain, but LSS sales were strong [as well].”
Five Star went on to state that sales for that category grew into the double-digit percentages. This is one example of how introducing single serve items can increase revenue and supplement the larger size offerings in your MicroMarket. It does take time and diligence to analyze the data and find out what works best for your customers. However it is well worth the effort.
“We have consistently seen that there is an excellent upside to installing a MicroMarket versus traditional vending, that’s the easy part!” said 365 Retail Markets Director of Sales, John Veit “To REALLY accelerate your sales and profits with a MicroMarket, you need to put in the effort to manage and optimize the offerings within the market.”
Remember that your MicroMarket needs to be as fluid as your customers in order to adequately meet their needs. A stagnant market will lose business, so be sure to regularly introduce new products, even if it’s new flavors of popular items.
