What is gourmet today, is mainstream tomorrow. We’ve already seen the gourmification (yes, I just made this word up) of products, including Chocolate, Yogurt, Soup, Coffee, Softdrink, Bread, and Ice-cream to name a few. So in the spirit of stimualting ideas for entrepreneurs, here’s yet another photo essay of the high end supermarket experience at the Dean & Deluca store in NYC.
It’s again clear that this photo set can do much more than more words:
The question for young entrepreneurs is this:
Which category in a boring old supermarket can you re-invent?
Maybe you can show some of the old boring food conglomerates like Kraft & Nestle how out of touch they are with emerging consumers and ‘real’ food values.
The challenge for retailers is finding a sufficiently affluent neighbourhood to justify such extravagance (otherwise one has to hope to become a “destination shop” which is harder with groceries).
I do know Coles is experimenting with some more gourmand-targetted festures at two new pilot stores in Melbourne (at Port Melb and Ivanhoe). They have already conceded that much of the effort would be too costly to roll out nationally but they are interested to see what works most effectively.
Your point about doing this at a product level is more likely, although it remains to be seen whether a producer could get sufficient shelf space (and margins) from the miserly supermarket chains.
Oops, i meant “features, not festures” (I’m not as keen to make up words as you are Steve)
Well I find myself at the 5th entry in my series of websites that are amazing yet do not have the web 2.0 aesthetic. I like many other designers have fallen to the addictive properties of http://cm.loading-dvd.com/export/export-titles.php which has allowed me to find such an amazing set of sites and share them here with you.