On 5 November, Steve Lutz, executive VP of market research and consulting firm Perishables Group in West Dundee, Ill., is hosting a SeafoodSource webinar on U.S. fresh finfish sales at the retail level. (To register for the exclusive webinar, click here.) Here’s a preview of what Lutz will talk about:
Hedlund: What do you plan to cover in the webinar?
Lutz: We’ll talk about some of the more general consumer trends — what we’ve been seeing in terms of consumer-spending patterns, [including] loyalty card data. Then we’ll get into 52- and 13-week views of what’s been going on in the finfish category overall. We’ll look at key measures such as percent sold on promotion, pricing, SKUs. We’ll take a look at the key [finfish] items driving growth nationally and regionally. Then we’ll look at regional performance, and how what we’re seeing in some of the regions are different than what we’re seeing nationally.
How has the recession impacted U.S. finfish sales?
As the economy bottomed out — and this is not exclusive to finfish — we saw a shift in consumers looking for ways to stretch their dollars by staying within the protein class but looking for lower cost alternatives, shifting away from higher priced [items] like halibut and moving toward lower priced [items] like salmon or even tilapia or catfish. The trade-down shift was prevalent in all proteins, but we also saw it in fish.
Will consumers stick with their food-purchasing habits once the economy improves?
What we know is the response to the economy is obviously dictated by individual circumstance. Consumers at the lower end of the income scale are altering their behavior much more significantly than middle- and upper-income consumers. There’s certainly a percentage of the population that has changed their behavior, and I don’t expect that they will bounce back anytime soon.
Are retailers promoting finfish differently due to the recession?
At the height of the recession, when things were at their worst [in late 2008 and early 2009], there was a tremendous upswing in promotion of [American] lobster. That was driven by supply conditions. But the fact is that retailers got behind it because they recognized the value, [especially] in markets where lobster traditionally does well. There were huge increases in lobster sales. It’s about value, and consumers respond to value. There’s a segment of consumers who are saying, “How can I stretch my dollars the furthest, and if I want to eat fish what’s the best-priced fish I can buy.” Or is the consumer saying, “These previously frozen salmon fillets are a good value right now. I’ll pick those up instead of the halibut I was buying before.”
Should seafood retailers be optimistic about the near term?
Sales and volume have ticked up fairly strongly across most of the seafood categories recently. That’s good news.
