The Retail Perspective: The Retail Food Buyer Pitch Meeting
There has never been a more exciting time to be an emerging food brand! Our mantra for our NewPoint clients: Get on the shelf. Stay on the shelf. Grow your market share. That’s why we talk to retail food buyers: they are the 1st gatekeeper to getting on the shelf. You may know your ideal consumer, but it’s a B2B sale first which means everything hinges on the retail food buyer pitch meeting
The more we know about what food buyers are looking for in a vendor partner, the better we are at helping our clients. We conducted over 25 in-depth retail food buyer interviews and surveyed several thousand more for my book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain. The buyers were from all size stores, big chains to small independents.
To build on that, we held a Retail food Buyer’s Roundtable at Purdue University as the centerpiece of our Emerging Food Brands conference last fall. We had a panel of 6 buyers from small independent chains like Baelser’s and Martin’s Supermarkets to Midwest rising stars like Fresh Thyme to Kroger.
Q1: What is one thing you wish food manufacturers knew about your job?
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. They are incredibly busy. They work in a highly competitive world. Not just the buyer’s category or the competitor across the street, or even the threat of Amazon and online sales. They are also competing against the shelf space of the category manager right next door to them. If their product line does not produce, they may lose their shelf space.
The Key Takeaway: Be Persistent
Here is a story of a small Midwest brand. It’s in a unique niche: paleo, gluten-free granola, but that doesn’t mean selling into retail is a slam dunk.
The snack category is one of the most competitive in the store. Moreover, no one knows this brand. The buyer indeed doesn’t. The owner told me how they were able to cut through the clutter and get placed at Kroger, Jewel, Meijer…and others: They kept at it. They held a schedule to call and ship samples until they booked a meeting. Also, the keep growing their distribution.
They do all their marketing on social media—on a very small budget, and it’s spot on—and are just now talking about adding formal marketing to the mix.
If you have any questions or would like to talk more about your retail food buyer pitch meeting, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.