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good packaging. Retailers need to understand that packaging plays a vital role in ensuring food is properly protected in the journey from kitchen to consumer.” He adds that retailers should ensure packaging is tamper evident and that items can be prepacked for customers to walk in and grab them. Keeping sales hot (and safe) Meris Food Equipment owner and Director Michael Brick says that while the lockdown period has been too brief for wide-scale implementation of new approaches to the category, it has certainly spurred some longer-term trends. “Although self-serve hot food provides immense potential to grow sales, the petrol and convenience sector in Australia has been slower than Europe to adopt it,” he said, “potentially due to lack of access to the appropriate technology and equipment. “COVID is likely to speed up this transition.” Mr Brick says the new “norms and hygiene vigilance” created by the pandemic will probably influence customers to avoid situations in which staff members lean over their food and pass food containers, for example. “Self-serve provides a way around this, while offering petrol and convenience businesses a range of other benefits such as faster service, reduced labour costs, greater flexibility with food display and store layout, efficient use of floor space, controlling customer flow and encouraging impulse purchases,” he said. To assist clients, Mr Brick says Meris will be working with related suppliers to develop appropriate hot food packaging for a range of different food products, in line with its “solutions focused” approach. “Customers’ new desire for the safe protection of their food will be important to the success of packaged food in open cabinets,” he said. He adds that food packaging offers a number of additional benefits, including longer shelf life (when the right packaging and process is adopted), reduced waste, less mess, merchandising and POS opportunities, less chance of cross-contamination, influence on customer purchases, and the chance for a greater number of food types to be merchandised and sold. Creating loyalty For P&C retailers to make best use of a loyalty program, they need initially to clarify and prioritise why they need such a program, says Adam Posner, CEO of The Point of Loyalty. “Gaining clarity on their objectives,” he said, “is critical to this process.” This, he adds, involves factors including: • Customer data acquisition for insights on buying behaviour – gaining deeper knowledge and insights on who their customers are, what they buy, when they buy, how often they purchase, what they purchase, how much they spend. • A platform for direct contactable communication with customers to influence their purchase behaviour. • A strategy to acquire new customers. • An incremental revenue generator, ie, through a well-structured and managed program, to gain incremental spend from a defined segment of customers who will go out of their way to purchase where the program is enticing compared with just going where it is convenient. • A consented (privacy compliant) TO PAGE 20 BUSINESS THROUGH INNOVATION JUL/AUG, 2020 CONVENIENCE WORLD 19