Restaurant trends create opportunities for supermarkets
By Mark DiDomenico Datassential, Inc. Today’s consumer is much more engaged with the foods and beverages they consume. Subsequently, they are driving faster adoption of trends. Nowhere is this more evident than in the restaurant channel, where operators are challenged with developing new and enticing menu options for their patrons’ ever evolving tastes. Those trends are also providing great challenges and opportunities for supermarkets, which are increasingly competing with restaurants. Datassential recently published an in-depth analysis of how supermarkets can grow their prepared food departments and become popular and profitable food service destinations in their own right. Here are some [...]
The right lights turn closed cases into ‘food galleries’
By Jack Sjogren Hillphoenix Design Center Specialist Using proper lighting inside and around closed-door refrigerated cases turns glass-fronted coolers into gallery-worthy display spaces. That increases the value of your investment in high-visibility cases, such as the Clarity line from Hillphoenix. And it ensures your closed cases not only offer energy savings and product longevity, but also show merchandise at its best. Here are a few tips for putting merchandise behind doors in the best light: Use warm-colored LED lights in cool spaces. Avoid white and blue-tinged light inside refrigerated cases. Instead, use blubs on the “warm” red-to-yellow color spectrum to [...]
Clarity line adapts to supermarket sizes and styles
By Kelly Sayko Hillphoenix Case Division Product Manager One-size-fits-all refrigeration equipment won’t work in today’s supermarkets, which come in all shapes and styles. What’s more, the growing popularity of store-within-a-store destination areas means a one-size refrigeration strategy may not even work across a single store. These days, grocers need refrigeration equipment that’s flexible, and Hillphoenix’s Clarity line was designed with adaptability in mind. The Clarity V Series Door Case is a great example. Not only do V Series refrigerated cases offer customizable door, frame and handle designs to suit any décor, they also come in standard and narrow sizes to [...]
Discover ways to light up meat sales
By Jack Sjogren Hillphoenix Design Center Specialist The right lights produce results. Just ask the owners of this supermarket in Crestline, California, a summer tourist area. Our Hillphoenix team helped them rethink lighting in the store’s meat department, and over three months departmental sales jumped 15% compared to the same three months the year before. (That sales boost came after peak tourist season, I might add.) We made simple changes with big visual impact that captured customers’ attention. The first step was shutting off existing in-case lighting — T8 fluorescents — that drained color from the meat and created an [...]
Your customers should understand sustainable refrigeration just enough to care
By Keilly Witman KW Refrigerant Management Strategy LLC The difference between mediocre communication and compelling communication lies in your message’s credibility, appeal, relevance, and distinctiveness. However, just like in refrigeration, when you fail to look at the whole picture, you wind up changing certain elements only to bring others out of whack. You lower your head pressure to save energy, but in doing so you lose heat reclaim capacity, which uses more energy, which brings you right back to square one. Similarly, in communication, overdoing it on one element, like distinctiveness, makes it harder to achieve another element, like credibility. [...]
Food Retailers Discuss the Future of Sustainable Refrigeration at Hillphoenix Tech Symposium
Nearly 30 ATMOsphere America attendees took a road trip from Atlanta to Hillphoenix’s Conyers, Georgia, headquarters for a day of delving into refrigeration technologies and trends — and a firsthand look at the latest cooling technology for food retailers. Hillphoenix’s June 24 Technology Symposium, managed by Supermarket Sense, was called “State-of-the-Art is Due for an Update.” It covered refrigeration topics and trends crucial to supermarkets, convenience stores and other food retailers. Among them: Current regulations and anticipated regulatory changes Emerging alternative refrigeration case technology, including developments in Hillphoenix’s Second Nature® CO2 Booster, Cascade and Secondary systems Ways to extend product [...]
Merchandising Tip: Moist and even cooling
Moist and even cooling – the kind that actually extends the life of meat and seafood – are hallmarks of the conduction approach to refrigerated display case design. Conduction is heat transfer through the direct physical contact of two objects (or surfaces) at different temperatures. When two objects are in contact, heat flows from the warmer surface of one to the cooler surface of the other until both reach the same temperature – also known as equilibrium. A display case using conduction includes a special type of deck pan through which a chilled fluid flows. When product is placed on [...]
Small-format trend calls for refrigerated cases designed for small spaces
By Kelly Sayko Hillphoenix Case Division Small-format stores now claim about half of consumers’ short shopping trips, according to market researcher IRI, and traditional retailers are adapting. Big-box stalwart Wal-Mart is reporting same-store growth of nearly 8% at its smaller-footprint Neighborhood Markets stores, compared to just 1.1% for its standard format stores. Meanwhile, small-format rival Aldi, a German discount chain, is planning to add 600 locations in the U.S. by the end of 2018, bringing its nationwide store count to 2,000. Even megastore IKEA is trying out 19,000-square-foot spaces — 94% smaller than the Swedish chain’s largest floor plan. Come [...]
Just Because It’s Difficult Doesn’t Mean We Shouldn’t Try
By Keilly Witman KW Refrigerant Management Strategy LLC This is the second article in a three-part series on sustainability and refrigerants. In part I of my series on communicating about sustainability in refrigeration with consumers, I discussed why it is difficult to make refrigeration relevant to stores’ consumers. Notice I said difficult – not impossible. Just because something is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be a challenge. And if there is anything we all love in this industry, it’s a challenge. I received my first lesson in the relevance of supermarket refrigeration to [...]
Merchandising Tip: Less can be more
Are crowded signs, melting ice, and other distractions stealing the attention away from your fresh meat and seafood? By keeping merchandising simple, you keep the focus on the product.