German grocery chain Lidl targets Annapolis for U.S. expansion

The interior of a Lidl store in the Czech Republic. The German global discount supermarket chain over 10,000 stores across Europe and is expanding into the United States.

 (Courtesy photo / HANDOUT)

Phil DavisContact Reporterpdavis@capgaznews.com

German grocery chain Lidl targets Annapolis for U.S. expansion

The European grocery chain Lidl has selected Annapolis for one of the first locations of its expansion into the United States.

The discount grocer has applied for a zoning variance from Anne Arundel County to build a 36,185-square-foot store on Bay Ridge Road, just outside city limits. Zoning rules require the variance for a store larger than 25,000 square feet at the location.

The German company operates more than 10,000 stores in 28 countries in Europe and has been looking to extend its footprint on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

It is developing an 800,000-square-foot regional headquarters and distribution facility in Cecil County and has plans to open its first U.S. stores by 2018. In June, Aberdeen approved a site plan for a store, and published reports have listed Bowie and College Park as other spots under consideration.

If approved, Lidl would be the first new supermarket brand to open in the city since Fresh Market and Trader Joe's more than a decade ago. The first Harris Teeter location in the county is under construction in Severna Park.

Construction underway on county's first Harris Teeter

Neither officials with Lidl's U.S. operations nor their representatives in Annapolis could be reached for comment Friday.

In an October letter to the county Office of Planning and Zoning, attorneys for the chain said they're working with the Annapolis Neck Peninsula Foundation. The group has expressed opposition to growth along the Forest Drive corridor, which includes Bay Ridge Road.

Attorney Charles Schaller Jr. of Linowes and Blocher in Annapolis said the community group and the company have worked to be sensitive to each other's priorities.

"Lidl has worked extensively with the Annapolis Neck (Peninsula) Federation in preserving as much forest or 'green space' while meeting county parking requirements and other site development constraints," he wrote.

Anastasia Hopkinson, vice president of the federation, said the group is generally happy to see a major chain such as Lidl interested in the site but said there are reservations about the size of the project.

"We're supportive of this type of development coming in, an alternative grocery site," Hopkinson said.

She pointed out that Lidl agreed to add a bike rack along with seating areas outside the supermarket. But the size of the store has created concern about loss of tree coverage and the addition of more pavement that will lead to greater stormwater runoff.

"We're chewing on that bone now," Hopkinson said.

"We want to see the footprint of the property to be as minimal as possible ... to have as much greenery left as possible."

The variance application does not outline how much vegetation Lidl would remove as part of the development. Schaller wrote that the property "contains mostly scrub and invasive vegetation with a few trees."

Hopkinson said it goes beyond just the potential for Lidl to clear away some of the area's natural forestation.

"In additional to our environmental standards, we also want a sense of place," she said. "Will it look like a really big object there?"

The property, owned by 12 members of the Samaras family, has been the focus of development efforts for years. When city officials updated its comprehensive plan in 2014, it flagged the area as one for potential growth.

The Samaras family originally sought to annex the property to Annapolis, but the plans for the store are being heard by the county. Ted Samaras, who has spoken for the family in the past, could not be reached for comment.

In requesting the 36,000-square-foot size, Schaller wrote that it is necessary to create a sales floor area big enough to make the supermarket economically viable. It would be located across Bay Ridge Road from the Bay Forest Shopping Center, where Giant Food has a 50,000-square-foot store.

"Lidl requires a sales floor area of 22,837 (square) feet in order to have a viable enterprise which in turn requires the building size to be 36,185 (square) feet," he wrote. "It seems reasonable and appropriate that a use variance be granted."

An administrative hearing is planned on the request Jan. 19.

Hopkinson said members of the federation will attend, but she did not know who would speak against the project.

Growing mega-cities will displace vast tracts of farmland by 2030, study says

Cropland losses will have consequences especially for Asia and Africa, which will experience growing food insecurity as cities expand

 New Delhi, India. Between 1991 and 2016 the population of India’s capital and its suburbs ballooned from 9.4 million to 25 million. The United Nations Report on World Urbanisation projects that Delhi will have 37 million residents by 2030. Photograph: OLI/Landsat 8/USGS/NASA

Emma Bryce

Tuesday 27 December 2016 17.18 ESTLast modified on Tuesday 27 December 2016 17.20 EST

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Our future crops will face threats not only from climate change, but also from the massive expansion of cities, a new study warns. By 2030, it’s estimated that urban areas will triple in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems that are already stressed by rising populations and climate change.

Roughly 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities—and that’s particularly worrying, the report authors say, because this peripheral habitat is, on average, also twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.

“We would expect peri-urban land to be more fertile than average land, as mankind tends to settle where crops can be produced,” says Felix Creutzig from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin, and principal author on the paper. “However, we were ignorant about the magnitude of this effect.” The agricultural losses they calculated in the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, translates to a 3 to 4% dip in global agricultural production.

This may not appear to be a huge figure at first glance, but on the regional scale the picture changes. Across countries and different crops, the effects of this loss vary and become more intense. In Africa and Asia especially—which together bear 80% of the projected loss due to rising urbanisation in these regions—urban expansion will consign farmers to an even tougher agricultural reality.

To arrive at the estimates, the researchers combined datasets on cropland location, productivity, and projected urban expansion by 2030. By superimposing these layers of information on one other, they could highlight the locations where cropland and urban spread are expected to intersect in the future. These projections reveal hotspots of loss in countries like Egypt, Nigeria, the countries that flank Lake Victoria in East Africa, and in Eastern China. (China alone is expected to experience one-quarter of the global cropland loss.)

A major worry surrounding the disappearance of this productive land is the impact it will have on staple crops such as maize, rice, soya beans, and wheat, which are cornerstones of global food security. Many of these crops occur in areas that will be consumed by urban spread in years to come. “Due to urbanisation in Nigeria, 17% of rice production and 12% of maize production will be hampered,” Creutzig says. “Egypt will lose more than 40% of its rice, and more than 60% of its maize.” In Africa, there will a 26% continental loss of wheat. Rice is forecast to suffer the most, with a 9% global decline, occurring predominantly in Asia where the bulk of this crop grows.

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 A high-speed train runs across farmland in Binyang County of Nanning, capital of south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images

Creutzig notes that some of this loss can be compensated for by agricultural expansion and intensification. But again, this isn’t possible everywhere on the planet: many regions are already limited by their inability to adapt to urban encroachment.

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For instance, in South Asia farmland can’t simply spread elsewhere, because fertile land is already running out. In India, agricultural expansion would force crops into habitats like wetlands that act as important buffers against flooding and sea-level rise. And in North Africa, worsening conditions driven by climate change will make the land that is available less suitable for farming. “Urbanisation pressure adds to other stresses on the food system, notably climate change,” Creutzig says.

This will undermine food security, with countries worst affected by urban expansion experiencing rising dependence on imports. That will leave them vulnerable to global fluctuations in food supply, and could also price crops out of reach of poorer populations.

Creutzig sees other subtler food security impacts at play as well—like the ousting of millions of smallscale farmers, as cities expand. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries—and so are instrumental to global food security. “As peri-urban land is converted, smallholders will lose their land,” he says. “The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.”

“In cases where farmers have no formal land rights, such as in Africa, governments may expel farmers from their land,” commented Anton Van Rompaey, a geographer from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who was not part of the study but has has done research on urban spread and its agricultural impacts in China. “In the past this has led to social instability and deadly conflicts between farmers and government.”

Facing this disturbing future food map, Creutzig predicts that growing food within the city’s margins—urban farming—could be part of the solution. “Urban agriculture is of course utterly insufficient to feed the urban population, but it is very important to maintain local supply chains and provide livelihoods and subsistence for urban farmers,” he says. However, regulations on expansion, to keep urbanisation as compact as possible, will be the bigger prerogative of cities, Creutzig says.

After the COP22 climate conference in November this year, there was a call to shift power from the national level to cities, which will be key players in curbing emissions and fighting global climate change. With croplands on the periphery of these urban hubs in peril, ensuring food security is set to become an important part of that mandate, too.

Wholesale Clubs Stealing Grocery Share of Holiday Spend

Thanksgiving spending at traditional grocers was stagnant: study

December 21, 2016, 02:35 pm

If Thanksgiving was any indication, traditional grocery retailers will continue to lose share to wholesale clubs this holiday season.

That’s according to the latest Bank of America Consumer Spending Snapshot, which recently released its November findings on travel, retail and grocery. The trends are based on November transaction and spending data from Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America’s more than 40 million active credit and debit customers.

More Consumers Gobble Up Wholesale Savings

During the Thanksgiving month, consumers spent 2 percent more per active account at grocery stores than in November 2015, after spend was flat from 2014 to 2015.

Spend per active account at mass-market chains decreased by 2 percent year over year, while wholesale club spend grew 22 percent during that time, after growing only 4 percent from 2014 to 2015.

Transactions at mass-market grocery stores were flat year over year. However, wholesale transactions grew 16 percent per active account during that time, after growing 5 percent from 2014 to 2015.

“Wholesale clubs are biting into mass-market grocery’s market share in terms of both spend and transactions,” the survey reported.

In November 2016, mass-market grocery made up 75 percent of all grocery spend, down from 78 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, wholesale clubs represented 18 percent of the total grocery spend in November 2016, up from 15 percent in 2015.

Mass-market grocery represented 85 percent of all grocery transactions in November 2016, down from 86 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, in 2016 wholesale clubs made up 7 percent of grocery transactions, up from 6 percent in 2015.

Retail Sees Web Shop Up, Store Shop Down

With the annual holiday shopping season commencing in November, retail spend per active account increased 2 percent compared with November 2015, and 3 percent from 2014 to 2015.

Retail transactions, however, were flat from 2015 to 2016, after increasing 5 percent from 2014 to 2015.

Online retail spend per active account increased by 23 percent year over year in November, after increasing 13 percent from 2014 to 2015. Meanwhile, retail shopping spend at point of sale decreased 3 percent from 2015 to 2016, after saying flat from 2014 to 2015.

Online retail transactions per active account increased 22 percent year over year after increasing 19 percent the year before. Meanwhile, point-of-sale retail transactions decreased by 4 percent year over year, after a 2 percent increase from 2014 to 2015.

Generation X (ages 35-50) had the highest spend per active account, at $363, while consumers age 65-plus had the least, at $257.

Millennials’ spend, meanwhile, was flat from 2015 to 2016, after increasing 4 percent from 2014 to 2015.

FEATURE

The biggest driver of sales growth in 2016: Convenience

Data shows products that touched on this and other top food trends found their way into more shopping carts

AUTHOR

Carolyn Heneghan

PUBLISHED

Dec. 30, 2016

Manufacturers, retailers and trend-spotters placed their bets on what would drive the food and beverage industry in 2016. Looking back at the year in sales growth, were those wagers wise?

Convenience is among the most common themes across the fastest-growing categories by dollar sales. But other factors, ranging from niche trends and unsuspecting winners, also impact these final results.

The common theme? Convenience

Looking at the categories in food and beverage posting the highest sales growth in 2016, most have one overarching thing in common: convenience. According to Nielsen data provided to Food Dive, the fastest-growing food and beverage categories with more than $10 million in sales in the 52 weeks leading up to Oct. 29 included:

• Refrigerated breakfast entrée (82.3% dollar sales growth)
• Frozen gravy and sauce (42.2%)
• Frozen meal starters (33.6%)
• Refrigerated appetizer (27.2%)
• Liquid tea (19.8%)
• Sushi (16.1%)
• Liquid coffee (14.2%)
• Lunch combination (13.8%)

In the case of prepared foods — like sushi or refrigerated appetizers and breakfast entrees — the meal or snack is essentially ready to eat. Categories like frozen meal starters and sauces make meal preparation faster and easier. Liquid coffee and tea are easier to transport and drink on the go.

“Convenience is driving a lot of what we're seeing to be flying off the shelves in stores,” Jordan Rost, VP of consumer insights at Nielsen, told Food Dive. “It's really shifting a lot of the balance of power, and this is a trend that has continued for a little while now.”

A recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture supports these insights and sales statistics.

Convenience also intersects more frequently with better-for-you foods and beverages, such as healthier snacks or value-added produce.

“It really speaks to people want to live more healthfully and eat more healthfully, and fruit that's already cut up for them is a great and convenient way to do that,” said Rost. “Consumers still want all the other things they are looking for in food, but that extra layer of convenience is still a priority.”

The rise of sushi and retailers’ prepared foods

The convenience factor across these categories comes from more than manufacturers looking for ways to make meal preparation and consumption faster and easier. Retailers play a critical role too, particularly through their deli and prepared foods departments. Grocery prepared foods can be a middle ground for consumers between going out to eat and enjoying a meal prepared at home.

 

Credit: pryainphoenix

 

Sushi, which aligns with consumers’ desire for convenience, fish-based protein and multicultural flavors, is emblematic of all of these trends.

“So many different consumers are going to the deli department and looking for the prepared sushi selection, and that's not just a niche offering,” Rost said. “It really has become much more of a mainstream experience, and I think it does speak to the changing nature of the multicultural landscape of the way that we're all eating. …(Sushi) is not that exotic thing anymore. It really does become a bigger, more widely accepted part of all the things that we're eating.”

How niche trends can drive category growth

Liquid RTD tea and coffee are also aligned with the convenience of many of the fastest-growing categories. However, niche trends may be driving their growth even more.

 

Credit: Ca Phe Sua Nong

 

“You're seeing things like kombucha or cold brew coffee really drive those categories,” said Rost. “There's a lot of innovation happening there, and they say that does relate to health and wellness. But you really do get to see those trends that show up in terms of having a material impact on growth and fundamentally redefining the different categories.”

When niche trends become more mainstream, category growth flourishes.

“We probably have seen cold brew go a bit more mainstream than kombucha at this point," Rost said. "But that's something we will be looking at in the next year to see to what degree do these trends actually make their way across more of America and start to become more mainstream.”

Why frozen foods are among both the winning and losing categories of 2016

Frozen foods were an intriguing dichotomy in 2016, appearing with both the winning and losing categories of the year. Frozen foods had lost market share in recent years, in part because of a perception they were highly processed foods with fewer healthy ingredients.

Responding to this backlash, several frozen foods brands — from Nestle’s Lean Cuisine and Pinnacle’s Birds Eye to B&G’s Green Giant — have made efforts to turn around the category through ingredient and marketing innovations.

But certain fundamental components about the frozen category have made these products both slow- and fast-growing.

“Being frozen appeals to the idea of convenience, especially in the case of meal starters — you can get dinner together more quickly,” said Rost. “What we're seeing is that frozen is still great way to get a meal going, and then you can incorporate other ingredients, maybe fresh produce, or other parts of the store that round out that meal.”

 

Credit: Flickr user 1950sUnlimited

 

While many frozen category sales growth stats may suggest the eventual death of this category, many experts don’t feel the same way. The frozen products that find a way to be healthy and convenient meals, while dodging common criticisms from health-conscious consumers, may have staying — and growing — potential.

“There is definitely not a wholesale shift away from frozen, but in fact we're seeing growth within frozen of things like natural and organic,” said Rost. “You do start to see less of a departmental-wide change and much more of a nuance appeal that each individual category, each individual product, does offer to different consumers.”

Looking at these sales statistics and product category growth doesn’t always demonstrate the entire picture of the food and beverage industry.

“Many of the categories that we see there [at the bottom] are really being hit by deflation,” said Rost. “A lot of the declines we're seeing is not necessarily because of consumer demand declining but really just because of the economics of how those departments — their margins are thinning.”

“There is opportunity within meat and dairy and all the other categories where we have seen decline, above and beyond frozen, to start winning back some of that share because consumers are actually able to buy more of those things because prices have gone down from the consumer perspective,” said Rost. “We'll start to see a really interesting shift into next year as supply and price pressures potentially start to level off. We'll have to see what next year brings.”

Just Eat showcases innovative “food tech” – the future of online delivery

Clare McDonaldProfile: Clare McDonald

Online food delivery service Just Eat has a number of ideas for how food tech will influence the future of online food delivery, including technologies such as augmented reality (AR) artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic delivery carriers.

There have been a lot of strides made in the food delivery market – barely anyone picks up the phone to order a takeaway anymore and thanks to particular services you can now get food brought to your home from places that don’t even deliver.

Just Eat wants to be at the forefront of the delivery market. Not just content with offering a fast online service for choosing and ordering takeaway, it recently showcased what it thinks the future of food delivery will look like.

The future of ordering food

The first step in the takeaway process is ordering food, and Just Eat has several new ideas about how these orders can be placed.

It seems as though Just Eat plans to thoroughly embed itself in the Internet of Things, with many connected devices around the house displayed in its demo space through which to order meals.

The first was through Amazon Alexa, the voice-driven artificial intelligence which allows users to talk to products such as the Amazon Echo and gain a response/action.

Users will be able to speak to the Echo and place and order through Just Eat. Alexa will repeat the order back to you and allow you to pay, presumably using stored payment details, then tell you how long until your delivery arrives.

The Apple TV was next with an application connecting to smartphones on the same network, allowing a group of people to make their food choices separately, which then contribute to a single group order which is sent to a vendor.

The Apple TV app prompts people contributing to the order to open the Just Eat on their iPhone or iPad and make their food selection – once they have finished their order appears on the screen along with how much they owe.

It was unclear  from the demo whether you can then pay separately, but this would be the ideal in a group situation in the future – everyone orders what they want, pays what they owe, and the restaurants receives one huge list to send to a single address. Simple.

Just Eat claims this application should be available in 2017.

A new Xbox One application was also revealed, which the Just Eat team hopes will be available to use by Christmas 2016.

Similarly to the Apple TV app, the Xbox One application will allow users to browse their previous orders, search for restaurants or explore popular dishes before ordering and paying.

Some of the technology was behaving badly on demo day – for example pair of Augmented Reality glasses meant to display physical representations of food items on a flat surface in front of the user had a whole selection of sushi floating eerily in mid-air.

But hitches are to be expected in the early stages of technology adoption, and there is a clear use case for an AR menu allowing a customer to actually explore what a dish will look like before they order it.

It was particularly useful to see portion sizes – too often when food turns up some dishes can either be too much or not enough.

As with many AR technologies though, you can look a bit silly using it – the hope in the future is that you can use your hands to select and order menu items displayed in front of you through your AR device, which in this case is a HoloLens.

Just in case you have a problem with these services, Just Eat has also been working on a customer care chatbot using the Microsoft Bot Framework to help deal with queries,  as well as a Facebook Messenger chatbot you can use to order food or get suggestions on what to eat.

The possible future of food delivery (and the transport industry)

Roaming the floors of the trendy Shoreditch warehouse Just Eat has its showcase in were self-driving delivery robots.

These have already been on trial for pizza firm Dominos in New Zealand, and it also experimented with delivering pizza by unmanned aerial drone in late 2016.

The thing to worry about most for these would be vandals – why mug a pizza boy on his bike who has the potential to defend himself when you can intercept and destroy a lone robot?

Again, there are kinks to work out, but the Just Eat robot was happily wandering around amongst customers during the demo.

These self-driving robots would detect if someone was walking in front of them and take a different path to their destination.

It’s also possible that they’d be more capable of keeping food hot during its journey from restaurant to your door than the traditional thermal bag or tin container food is delivered in now.

Also, you won’t have to tip a robot – at least not until we enter the dystopian future in which robots become self-aware and gain equal rights.

Something for the restaurant owner

Once orders have been placed, food has been delivered and payments have been made, any restaurant owner worth their salt should be using the data collected during this process to work out how to improve.

One of the pieces of kit Just Eat was showcasing included an AR system that food retailers can use to gain data insights – both from their own data and data collected by Just Eat.

Restaurants can use the system to determine how much their revenue would increase if they began delivering to a new area, how many orders they can expect to have from that new area in a certain time period and whether such an expansion would be worthwhile.

The demo system didn’t do much more than this, but it’s the type of technology which, in the future, could seriously enhance a retailer’s capability to make accurate and profitable business decisions – and ensure we all have access to more tasty food.