“Meat to Meals” Research Reveals Opportunities for Greater Shopper Engagement
While you’ll always have “grab and go” customers who run into your store to pick up the basics for dinner, new research shows that today’s consumers want to be more engaged while meal shopping, especially at the meat case.
A 2010 “Meat to Meals”1 study conducted by the National Pork Board sought to better understand the grocery store “meal shopper” and identify opportunities to improve the meal shopping experience in order to better satisfy customers and build loyalty. One of the key objectives of the study was to use these shopper insights to determine how to gain a larger share of meals with meat.
The research results reinforce the key positioning of the meat department in the overall shopping experience, and underscore the crucial need for retailers to understand and meet shoppers’ meal needs in order to effectively capture more meat purchases.
Here are the study's key takeaways:
- Shoppers have a higher standard for engagement at retail that will impact the meat department.
- The meat department is a “centerpiece” in shoppers’ lives, serving as a core element in determining important decisions about their families’ meals.
- As the center of shoppers’ meal planning, the meat department has the opportunity to improve “shopability”.
- There are three distinct types of shoppers when it comes to planning prior to a shopping trip: Pre-Planners, In-Between and Ad Hoc/Last Minute.
This study points to the need to address the challenges faced by today’s meal shoppers and implement changes to help realize the meat department’s full potential to provide meal solutions.
1“Meat to Meals” Shopper Research Study, Meridian, June 2010.