Selling vegetables is a different ball game

Selling vegetables is a different ball game
28 Aug, 2007, 0209 hrs IST,Prasenjit Ray,

Arrival of organised retail has given some of us an opportunity to roam about and window-shop in malls and stores and yet call it a professional engagement. In my brief career as a shopping researcher, I have come across a common concern among several of my supermarket clients both in the country and outside-that of selling fresh vegetables. It’s a high-margin, high-risk (for its perishable nature) category and nobody seems to be happy with how things are.

I am a shopper myself. I go to a supermarket close to my house to buy things for myself and my family. Every time I go there I watch people shop the refrigerated section - it has beverages, chocolates, dairy products and, of course, vegetables and fruit in one corner.

And every time I have been amazed seeing how most shoppers skip the fruit and vegetables altogether! One of our continuous studies shows that a significant portion of supermarket shoppers are regulars. That really means that though people are going to the same supermarket over and over again, but they may not be buying fresh vegetables from there.

As a student of shopping I started by looking at some of the vital parameters of fresh shopping and compared them with shopping for other products.

To begin with, the biggest component of fresh shopping at the wet market or at the door step cart is seller interaction or talking to the seller. It really means that of all the things we do while buying vegetables, we talk to the seller the most. No other product category in the fast moving segment takes in so much of seller interaction as does fresh.

Second, shopping for fresh has the highest product interaction to price ratio among all the fast moving products. In other words, for every rupee spent on buying any fast moving products, we touch and feel the vegetables the most number of times.


Now what do these two parameters tell us when put together? First, we have a great need for assuring ourselves that what we are buying is of good quality, because unlike a packet of biscuit or a can of coke or a jar of edible oil, which comes with the quality assurance of a Britannia, a Coca-Cola or an ITC, quarter kilo of green bell paper or bitter gourd doesn’t come with any of that.

So who is to be blamed if it turns out rotten or stale? This is also the reason for all that seller interaction, the fact that we are looking reassurance from the seller in his or her recommendation, for it’s his merchandise and he is the expert.

Fresh shopping also has another character about it - the variety involved in a single shopping and purchase occasion. I have observed some similarities between how we buy vegetables and snacky kind of products. In both cases, we don’t just buy all of one thing but little of many things. Imagine how it would feel to buy biscuits, from a shelf stocked with just thin arrowroot or glucose! Same goes for pumpkin, papaya or potatoes unless we are looking for a great deal and want to buy in big quantities.

The other similarity between the two is the way we shop for them - when we start shopping, we aren’t looking for something specific, so we just browse until something entice us by its looks and we stumble on it. The important aspect here is of merchandise - we like to browse a range of vegetables together in one place and we stick at something depending on how it looks.

An important parameter about fresh shopping is the timing - it’s not the first thing we buy in a supermarket when we have to shop for other things as well. I was at a Tesco store at Kuala Lumpur observing their fresh section, which was in the middle of the store and not surprisingly, it had few takers. And those who were there, were mostly hitting the check out counters straight. Most supermarkets here have got this one right - fresh section is close to the check out but not too many who have an exclusive entry to it.

Supermarket shopping is at a nascent stage in our country. We are yet to get into a weekly shopping mode - we buy most of our groceries once a month and that makes it once-a-month visit to the supermarket, if at all. As and when we start going more often to the supermarket, we will find natural reasons to shop for the fresh vegetables as well. And that’s the time when these nuances will start making differences to our lives and to the bottom line of the retailer.

Recently I had been to a Spencer’s supermarket in one of the suburban malls of Delhi and was heartened to see a replica of vegetable cart and a variety of vegetables kept on them. They looked wee bit tired but that’s ok for starters. At least, we are moving in the right direction. I am sure we will soon see all the vegetables put in such displays with a section-anchor looking after each piece of vegetable merchandised, spraying water on them and weeding out the ones that are getting tired and soggy.

The author is In-store Consulting Services founder & CEO