A partner with SKU Foods says in order to maintain markets the pork sector needs to be ready to respond to changing consumer buying habits.
“Grocery Store Decision Making: How to get more Pork on the Fork?” was discussed last week as part of the 2018 Manitoba Swine Seminar in Winnipeg.
Peter Chapman, a Partner with SKU Foods, says in Canada 95 percent of food still goes through the traditional food distribution, the large retailers, but more and more people are looking on line for options and new distributors such as drug stores and club stores are moving into food distribution.
It’s changing in more than one way. It’s changing in that there’s more customers, retailers to buy the product but it’s also changing in the fact that products, or in the case of today we’re taking about the pork industry, can now develop that relationship directly with the consumer through social media and some of the other things that are open to them to develop that relationship.
You definitely need to understand the market where you want to sell your products and what are the real attributes that they are looking for. Are they looking for taste, are they looking for convenience, are the looking for price? There’s all kinds of different things and it’s going through that buying decision tree and saying how do we deliver that to them and there’s different ways people can do that.
You can talk to them but I always caution people that what consumers say and what they do are two different things. So it’s important to talk to them but it’s also important to observe them and go to the store and watch and see how people are behaving. It’s understanding those consumers and that really should drive the rest of the decisions.
For me, when I come to something like the Manitoba Swine Seminar, we really have to look at it as an industry solution. It can’t be just producer driven or just processor driven. We need to be holding hands and trying to understand what is that end user looking for and how can we deliver it to them.
~ Peter Chapman, SKU Foods
Chapman says stakeholders are looking at solutions and they’re focused all they have to do such as great production and safe production but also how they can sell more.
