We see three threads coming together that could spell opportunity for food marketers.
First, IRI MarketPulse Survey Q4, 2014 came up with this prediction for 2015 CPG shoppers:
43% of Shoppers plan to buy large packages to get the lowest price per serving.
43% is a big number, but so what, you say? Bulk is nothing new to the likes of the Costco warrior.
But take a look at this: A new ‘crowdsharing’ website called WholeShare, which enables shoppers to form buying groups and use their purchasing power to buy wholesale. The CPG sells in bulk, and lets the group break up the quantities. Easy peasy.
Who’s going to form one of these groups? Young people with adventurous tastes who want to be able to afford to experience new foods.
Okay you say, but putting a group together and managing the distribution seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through? Maybe not. Because then we saw THIS:
The New York Times pointed out that recent graduates are coordinating their living situations so that they are all in the same building, making socializing easy.
They’re already living down the hall from one another. That makes crowdsharing easy. We envision a group of 12 to 20 friends forming a WholeShare group and seeking unusual cheeses at a great rate, or buying whole cases of your imported tomatoes, or supporting an entire small farm enterprise.
It’s like Friends, if everyone was Monica, the food-obsessed chef.
If we were you, we’d be talking to WholeShare and seeing how we could get listed. Because if you could sell wholesale to a sizeable group without extra hassles, why wouldn’t you? And because getting this kind of selling under your belt before your competitors do is proactive thinking. Because retail is so last century. And you don’t need an article to tell you that.