Innovation, the engine that drives forward businesses and keeps them ahead of their competition, has become an essential feature of today’s fresh fruit and vegetable sector. It’s something of a touchstone of success in the supply chain, as companies develop new products and introduce new concepts to keep their food retail customers happy.
Fresh produce companies up and down the supply chain now battle with each other to win Fruit Logistica’s prestigious annual innovation award while FRESH, organised by Eurofruit Magazine and Freshfel Europe, has chosen innovation as the central theme of its two-day conference in Valencia next May. Innovation really is the name of the game.
Our supermarket customers have been driving innovation, but the focus has been largely on the supply chain, not to mention funded by it. While huge efforts have been made to develop innovative products in new types of packaging, it is fair to say that supermarkets have not made a similar effort to develop new ways of selling their products.
Take a really hard look at what our supermarket partners are doing in their fresh fruit and vegetable departments and you’ll know what I’m saying: you’ll be hard pressed to find any real innovation going on in the fresh fruit and vegetable departments of Europe’s leading supermarket outlets.
Supermarkets say otherwise. Most maintain a spartan head office to demonstrate that all their spending is focused on store improvements. Today’s newest supermarkets may well be temples of fresh food compared to the outlets of old, but look beneath the surface and there’s little or nothing new to the way in which shoppers are encouraged to buy the bewildering range of fresh fruits and vegetables their supermarkets have to offer.
It’s a fact that is brought home by a recent visit to Real’s Future Store, a concept outlet close to Düsseldorf that has been developed by the Metro-owned supermarket chain. Twenty or more world-beating technology companies such as SAP, Intel, IBM and Siemens use the store to trial new concepts, all of them designed to improve our shopping experience: here you use a mobile phone to scan your purchases, you get to listen to the sounds of the sea when you’re at the fish counter, your fresh fruits and vegetables are automatically recognised by the weighing machine and you’re able to use your fingerprint to pay for your groceries.
This technology is impressive and yet it betrays a key area of concern for modern food retailers. Technology, when it works, helps us beat the queues at checkout but it’s close to useless when it comes to helping us make our purchasing decisions. Self-service retailers ought to innovate by investing more to train their in-store staff so that shoppers have a knowledgeable human being to turn to when they’re in the fresh produce department. Let’s develop machines that carefully restock the shelves when they’re short of produce and put the money into a team of fresh produce department managers who really know their products and can sell them to us. Now that really would be innovative, wouldn’t it?
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