The British love convenience when it comes to food, and fruit and vegetables are no exception.
Prepared produce is worth £1.3 billion annually – more than both crisps and ice cream – and 91 per cent of the population buy prepared fruit and veg. That’s a higher percentage than purchases yoghurt or – perhaps more surprisingly – toothpaste.
Over the past five years, prepared produce has consistently outgrown wholehead produce, and it’s been a win-win situation. For consumers, this format meets their need for convenience, it encourages the kind of trading up which is great for retailers and has allowed suppliers to develop points of difference when it comes to production capabilities.
The average household buys prepared produce just over once a fortnight (28 times annually), so what scope is there for future growth? The answer, in this case, comes in realising that the ‘average’ doesn’t tell you everything.
In fact, only 320,000 households hit that ‘average’ figure when it comes to fresh produce. A quarter of shoppers buy prepared fruit or vegetables less than once every three months, and so the category is heavily reliant on a small number of shoppers – and this needs to change.
For prepared produce to find continued growth, it needs to rethink its image – at the moment it is a more specific and seasonal purchase than it could be.
Retailers need to understand the hook that draws people into purchasing in the first place – convenience – and what it is that prevents these purchases from being repeated.
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