Many supermarket prepared food departments have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Responding to consumer demand for inexpensive, convenient meal solutions, those departments arguably attracted shoppers away from casual dining restaurants and takeout food during the recession.
But, as the economy improves, these departments could start to feel the impact of renewed competition from restaurants in their area. It's a good time to take stock of ways a department's offering could be enhanced or tweaked.
One aspect of a quality take-out experience is product packaging, and a move toward more attractive packaging is one long-term trend at restaurants, according to Joe Pawlak, vice president of Technomic, a Chicago-based restaurant consulting group.
These new packages, such as black-bottom plastic containers, “complement and enhance the food that's being offered and meet its orientation.
For example, many supermarkets today are using packaging [for prepared foods] that customers would be more than willing to eat right out of, because it looks very attractive and enhances the price point.”
There are three key issues that prepared food departments should consider when selecting new packaging, Pawlak added. First, note the price point of the item or items being sold. How does the price point of a potential package compare? If the price point is low, an expensive package cuts into margins and looks out of place.
Second, consider how customers will transport and use the product. Is it a hot or a chilled item that a customer will probably take offsite and eat immediately? Or is it something that they will store and microwave later? The package should facilitate the most common usage scenarios while keeping the food as attractive as possible.
Third, examine the customer base that the prepared food departments serve, and get a sense of how important environmental issues are to them. If these issues are top of mind for shoppers, then they are probably interested in recyclable or biodegradable packaging. For natural food chains, this is usually a given.
“If part of your message is that the products you sell are good for the environment — natural and organic or locally grown foods — then absolutely,” said Pawlak.
Conventional supermarket chains, by contrast, may want to consider environmentally friendly packaging on a market-by-market basis, given the expense. Although there have been many exciting developments in compostable and biodegradable materials in recent years, packages made with those materials can still cost much more than conventional packages.
The movement toward environmentally friendly packaging is certainly being driven by consumer demand, Pawlak said, but “it's not moving as fast as one would expect, because … sometimes it's maybe two or three times the cost on a per-unit basis compared with standard packaging that would be used by a supermarket operation.”
Once price point, functionality and environmental considerations are addressed and a new package is selected, there are opportunities for package customization that many restaurants are now taking advantage of, and many prepared food departments may be overlooking, Pawlak said.
For example, packages can be embossed or printed with a supermarket's brand, or the name of the supermarket's prepared food department. Yet, perhaps because of the added expense, many retailers don't take advantage of this opportunity.
Many shoppers are also eager for more nutritional information, Pawlak said. Yet few supermarket take-out or grab-and-go packages include ingredient lists and nutritional information. That type of labeling, particularly with better-for-you foods, could help set a prepared food department apart from local competitors.
However, designs and labels should be as uncluttered as possible. Lynn Dornblaser, global new products expert for Chicago-based Mintel International Group, explained that one “big picture” packaging trend has been an increase in packaging that conveys a product's benefits in a clear and simple way. For example, Pillsbury's new “Simply …” line of refrigerated doughs touts its use of basic all-natural ingredients that people would use when cooking at home. The design of the package works to illustrate that concept.
“It's very clean, very simple,” she said. “It communicates benefits in a very straightforward way.”
And, while the packaging industry's efforts to make products that are more convenient and functional and products that are more environmentally friendly may at times seem like mutually exclusive goals, Dornblaser noted that these goals are starting to converge in the world of consumer packaged goods.
“You might think that convenience and sustainability are at odds with one another when it comes to packaging,” Dornblaser said. “Quite often, products that are really convenient, products that are positioned as being grab-and-go, often have quite a bit of packaging. We do see some examples, in the U.S. and elsewhere, that address both issues at the same time.”
One recent example is Coca-Cola's new PlantBottle, which is currently being tested with Dasani and Coca-Cola products on the West Coast. While most recyclable PET plastic bottles are made from petroleum, the new PlantBottle is made with 30% plant-based materials.
“Think about the impact of that,” Dornblaser said. “All of the Coke PET bottles substituting 30% of a petroleum source for a plant source. The impact on the environment, theoretically, could be staggering. To me, that's a very good example of how a product that is inherently convenient — a bottle of water or a bottle of Coke — can have a very strong environmental positioning as well.”
And, industry veteran Timothy Bohrer, now owner of Pac Advantage Consulting, points out that the industry has a long history of working to make packages that consume fewer resources and require less energy to transport. He worked on his first lightweighting project in 1973, he noted.
“The principle objective at that time was to save some money, but the ancillary benefit was that we took material out of the package, and were able to deliver the same performance, and the same product quality at a lower cost, using less material,” Bohrer said. “That's sustainability. My view is that there's been a whole lot of that going on [in the packaging industry, historically] although it hasn't always been called that.”
Wal-Mart Stores famously drew suppliers' attention to the lightweighting/packaging reduction issue in 2006 with the release of its packaging scorecard, which graded suppliers' packaging on issues such as product-to-package ratio, cube utilization, transportation costs and innovation.
But, Bohrer pointed out that regardless of the attention being paid to issues such as packaging reduction, biodegradability and compostability, suppliers and retailers have to keep in mind that functionality remains the paramount concern when developing or selecting a package. If a package does not serve its primary purpose of protecting, transporting, and in the case of prepared food departments, serving a product, then the product and the package are both wasted.
“If it's meaningful functionality, you can't mess with that,” he said. “The most environmentally unfriendly thing that can occur is for the product to be rendered unusable. The energy and greenhouse gas profiles associated with making the product, in 99% of the cases, is much greater than that for the package. So, the protective aspects of the package are absolutely crucial. That can't be sacrificed.”
Bohrer argues that the future of the industry will be shaped by those who take a comprehensive view, developing functional packages with the most appropriate materials in the most efficient way.
“On the surface, everything we hear about is ‘reduce, reduce, reduce,’ and I'm in favor of that, as long as everyone looks at the bigger picture,” Bohrer said. “Then, you're including the product, the consumers' use of that product, the sustainability of the materials from which the product is made. We're learning to draw a bigger boundary, and as we do that, we find that this is a much more complex equation than one might think.”
In the future, prepared food departments may not need to sacrifice environmental friendliness for functionality, attractiveness or price. For now, engineers are still trying to solve several intractable challenges. Most compostable materials have trouble withstanding moisture, for example. On a simpler level, paper-based packages often don't insulate as well as synthetic packages made from polystyrene or plastic.
And, paper packages aren't always the most environmentally-friendly alternative.
“One of the things that consumers say is that paper products are the most environmentally friendly,” said Pawlak of Technomic. “That's somewhat of a misconception. A lot of disposable paper products have a plastic poly-lining on them which is not going to decompose well.”
All of these factors pose challenges when suppliers and retailers try to bring environmental concerns into the equation. But, if the issue simply comes down to cost, prepared food department managers may be surprised that the demographic that is driving demand for environmentally friendly packages may have a little more to spend than the average shopper. It's not just college students.
“There's also little bit of a misconception regarding who is pushing this trend,” said Pawlak. “In college areas, [environmental concerns] index a little higher in the general population, but it's really the boomers. When we've done research, time and time again, they over index with concern for the environment and preference for environmentally friendly packaging. It's from concern about their legacy going forward.”
