Report: Opportunities Abound For Grocers As Millennials Enter Heavy Spending Life Stage
Shopping less but spending more per trip than older generations, Millennials will move into the heaviest spending life stage over the next 10 years and create opportunities for retailers to build trust, attract and retain this generation of shoppers through long-term strategies that focus on personalization, education and value. This trend is one of many examined in “What’s in Store 2016,” the annual trends research report published by the International Dairy-Deli-Bakery Association (IDDBA).
Other findings from the book’s Consumer Lifestyles section include:
• Retailers can best reach Hispanic American shoppers by focusing on “family” and “celebration” and engaging with them via technology, of which they’re heavy users.
• Millennials are shopping convenience stores at a growing rate: 11.1 percent in 2014, compared to 7.7 percent in 2006. This is one example of Millennials’ preference for shopping in non-traditional retail outlets, where they now make the majority of their food purchases.
• Transparency continues to be an important purchasing consideration among Millennials. “They now believe that their purchasing decisions have a greater and lasting impact on society than voting does, which is the opposite of Boomer consumers,” says The Hartman Group CEO Laurie Demeritt.
• Single-person households represent 28 percent of all homes, while 47 percent of all eating occasions involve people eating alone. Both trends illustrate the importance of offering single-serve, fresh food options and convenience.
With 30 years of credible reporting, What’s in Store is an essential dairy-deli-supermarket foodservice-bakery-cheese resource providing vital data on the retail and market trends, growth and category changes shaping the food industry, according to IDDBA. IDDBA also offers What’s in Store Online, a collection of 150 downloadable tables, as well as white papers and trends articles.
A secondary research report, What’s in Store is developed through both interviews with industry experts and sourcing of third-party data and trends. (A complete listing of sources can be found here.)
This year’s edition of What’s in Store has a more continuous storyline to improve user efficiency and provide greater clarity for professionals needing to understand today’s retail world. Through five themes, readers gain new insights and learn about marketplace influences. In addition to Consumer Lifestyles, they are: The Economy & Retail Trends; Channels & Competition; Eating Trends; and Technology and Marketing.
The themed narrative is carried into each of the product chapters: Bakery, Cheese, Dairy and Deli. The new format, exclusive interview content and inclusion of key insights, table interpretations, data callouts and testimonials enables the reader to more efficiently tie back to the broader context and then dig deeper in each of the product sections.
“Given the shifting demographics and purchasing behaviors of today’s shoppers, it’s imperative that retailers understand the evolving dynamics of today’s retail food landscape,” says Eric Richard, education coordinator at IDDBA. “What’s in Store 2016 provides supermarkets and grocers with the research and data trends needed for successfully connecting with their customers.”
