Product Satisfaction Comes First

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

It is useful when reading research such as this to remember that, by far, the largest restaurant chain in the United States is McDonald’s, and the fastest growing large food retail segment is the deep discount sector, with companies such as ALDI, Save-A-Lot, and Dollar stores front-and-center. Or put another way, it is useful to remember that when confronted by survey data where consumers say one thing and their food-purchasing activity is the polar opposite, the reasonable thing to do is to ask why consumers choose to say such things.

Part of the reason is probably that these responses are like “Mom and apple pie” of an earlier age. To say one doesn’t care about sustainability, supporting the local community, eating healthy, etc., is to say one is abominable. The fact that this was an online study might also play into it. Perhaps consumers fear that permanent records of their responses could be kept and one day come back to haunt them, so they especially want to say the right things.

In the face of hard numbers that say consumers don’t actually procure with the priorities expressed in surveys such as this, we need to try to understand the consumer psyche better.

One possibility is that the consumers questioned in this survey are not necessarily doing the procurement for their families. This is a survey of “a demographically representative sample of 1,003 adults, comprising 500 men and 503 women 18 years of age or older.” That is not the same as being a sample base of “primary grocery shoppers.” It may well be that adults who are not responsible for handling a household food budget — from a college student on a meal plan to a wealthy matron who has the maid buy the groceries, to a befuddled husband who just picks up take-out — are freer to express their values than those who actually have to feed the family on the funds available.

The results also are not weighted by food purchasing volume. Today only about half of U.S. adults are married. So if all the single people express a willingness to pay more for, say, local, and all the people who are buying for a spouse and brood of kids say they won’t, the survey may accurately report that 50 percent of respondents say ‘yes’ but that would not be reflective of spending activity. Of course, today many non-married people have children, so the breakdown is not going to be simple.

A big part of the answer can be found in other parts of this study, the 2014 Cone Communications Food Issues Trend Tracker. Although it contains all the earnest-sounding exhortations that Ms. Dasilva highlights, it also contains other information. For example, when consumers were asked what factors are important when deciding which food products to purchase for their families, they ranked many factors as important, but the factor with the highest ranking for “Very/Somewhat Important” was “Family satisfaction — the products my family or I most enjoy eating.”

Indeed, when asked to select only one top concern when deciding what food products to purchase for their families, Sustainability received just 5 percent, whereas Family Satisfaction received 54 percent.

Responses such as this put the results highlighted by Ms. Dasilva in perspective. Assuming they are speaking the truth and not just saying what they think is the “right” answer, they are still adding a big caveat. They may be willing to pay more for local, they may want to have sustainable options, they may wish to avoid GMOs, etc., but they will only use these purchase criteria after the “products my family or I most enjoy eating” criteria are satisfied. If you were to translate these ideas into the restaurant world, it almost implies that these consumers would really like it if McDonald’s would make them feel better about their purchases there by posting signs explaining that the beef on a Big Mac is raised sustainably.

Very often in consumer research, consumers express many opinions, and these opinions need to be interpreted shrewdly. So in evaluating stores as shopping venues, consumers always rank price, cleanliness, and variety as most important factors. The problem is that translating this into useful information for a retailer isn’t that easy. Typically the results do not mean that stores should triple their cleaning staff or double their assortment, for example. The problem is that well-known facts tend to be acted on by all stores and so having reasonably clean stores, for example, becomes the ante to play the game and it becomes difficult to get a competitive edge here.

This survey reminds us that the ante for participating in the mass food market is producing and selling products that people and their families enjoy eating. To some extent, that may be influenced by “feel good” metrics such as sustainability but, mostly, this is taste and flavor. Only after our products meet the taste and flavor characteristics consumers want to eat can we expect other factors to move sales our way.