Speciality foods whetting consumer appetites
Backlash against bland mass-produced foods says Datamonitor
August 7 2002
Speciality foods are flourishing across Europe as consumers become increasingly jaded with mass-produced food.
A new report by market analysts Datamonitor found that while affluent, urban consumers have been the first to take up these foods, this will change as supermarkets bring the speciality sector to a wider audience. The supermarkets stand to gain from a projected 4.4 per cent increase in sales of these foods over the next 5 years, but the Datamonitor’s report, ‘Speciality & Gourmet Shoppers’ warns of the danger of the supermarkets undermining the business of smaller speciality retailers, which is the breeding ground for product innovation.
Dominik Nosalik, Datamonitor consumer markets analyst and author of the report said: “Consumers are becoming more disillusioned and bored with certain aspects of food and drinks. Many people have become concerned that the quality and taste of what they are eating is being compromised by manufacturers focus on mass production. For the more discerning ‘foodie’, the speciality retailer is the perfect answer. But our research has found that in the future it won’t just be affluent media types that buy these foods; as the supermarkets jump on the deli bandwagon they are helping to raise the profile of speciality foods and bring it to a wider audience.”
Speciality food and drinks are high quality, gourmet or delicacy food and drinks that will have individual, different, country or fine food characteristics. Individually, speciality producers may seem like small fry compared to the global giants of the consumer goods industry. However, collectively speciality food and drinks account for 4.6 per cent of European food and drinks sales, worth 33.8bn euros in 2001.
Datamonitor found that taste, variety, freshness and authenticity are the main reasons why core speciality shoppers are prepared to make time and effort to buy speciality goods.
Consumers are becoming more educated and experimental in their food and drinks choice as levels of travel and eating out rise. The influence of celebrity chefs, books, magazines and newspaper supplements is encouraging consumers to take a greater interest in cooking and be more experimental.
There is a core of speciality shoppers who account for 53 per cent of spend on speciality food and drink. These consumers typically work in professional, quasi-professional or media careers, belong to the ABC1 social grades and live in large cities or university towns. They are internationally orientated, open-minded and well educated. Although these speciality shoppers are not an especially large group, they are affluent and often at the cutting edge of emerging trends and opinion.
Datamonitor points out that multiple grocers have been taking business from small specialists, such as butchers and bakers, for many years. While small, family run food stores selling gourmet and high-quality speciality products are prospering, supermarkets have been catching onto the demand for higher quality products with the introduction of more regional and gourmet speciality products appearing on their shelves. Sainsbury’s has introduced a line of Special Selection high quality products from around the world, while in 2001, over half of Waitrose’s deli counter cheeses were speciality.
In Datamonitor’s survey, 25 per cent of speciality food and drinks shoppers said that they first became interested in speciality produce when they noticed them in the supermarket. Major grocers can therefore actually benefit smaller speciality retailers by generating increased interest and new customers for speciality goods.
Datamonitor warns that it is important that multiples do not overextend their speciality suppliers and push them to sacrifice product integrity and quality for efficiency. They should also avoid capturing too much of the speciality retailers’ consumer base too quickly, otherwise the breeding ground for innovative and high quality new products would be under jeopardy.
