What Will we be Eating? Building an Assortment to Match
The consumer landscape is changing in profound ways. Boomers are aging, millennials are having children and the youngest among us, the generation Z’s are becoming increasingly influential with grocery store purchase decisions. Add to that the shifting cultural mosaic in North America and one can begin to wonder what will people be buying over the next decade? More importantly are there subtle changes that can be made to today’s assortments to set a path towards assortment leadership in the next ten years?
This will likely come as no shock to anyone but we are in the midst of a cultural revolution towards health and wellness. This revolt against all things bad for our bodies began many years ago, and continues to gain steam as the years turn into decades. For this reason, it is not merely a trend but as mentioned, it is a revolution. Within this revolution however, there are emerging trends that could unlock the secrets to assortment leadership. For those who require empirical evidence of this revolution, the Nielsen Company completed a study in 2015 titled “We Are What We Eat”. This study showed that 83% of North Americans have changed their diet as part of a larger weight loss effort, more than any other people in the world. The number one change we made was to eat more natural, fresh foods.
Again, no shock here. But interestingly, this same study showed that the younger you are, the higher your propensity to pay a premium for healthy foods. 
Seniors and boomers scored 15% and 23% respectively when asked if they were willing to pay a premium. While generation Z and millennials scored 31% and 29% when asked the same question. Gen X’ers, as you’ve probably guessed fell right between the extremes at 26%. This suggests that demand for higher priced, healthy foods will continue to gain in favour as the younger generations replace the older for purchasing power supremacy.
So, health and wellness will continue to drive growth for the foreseeable future. What about other trends that are in line with health and wellness? We often link the idea of health and wellness to the overall wellbeing of our bodies. But how about the wellbeing of the planet or of the people that live on it? 20% of those surveyed in North America consider fair trade as a very important health attribute considered in their purchase decisions. Likewise, 20% and 24% of those same people said the same thing about locally produced and organic products respectively. Fairly-traded products have not yet gained a lot of traction in North America but could a change in the generational makeup of the population trigger a run on fairly-traded products? 
Since locally produced and organic products have already enjoyed growth, is fairly-traded next in line for a boon? Interestingly, North America ranks lowest in the world with respect to our feelings of importance on these health attributes. Latin America feels strongest about it while the Asia Pacific region is second and Africa and the Middle East rank as third. Immigration is the single largest contributor to population growth in both the United States and Canada. And where is this immigration coming from? Asia/Pacific, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America have replaced Europe as the primary contributors to immigration. There is a saying in Canada which is simply “30 in ‘30”. It refers to the percent of the Canadian population that will be a visible minority in the year 2030. In America, the makeup of the population will be even more diverse than Canada’s by then.
If you put two and two together you can start to see something pretty big and maybe even prophetic come together. Consider that the younger generations of today will grow significantly in purchasing power in the years to come and they have a high propensity to pay for health and wellness including products that are local, organic or fairly-traded. Also consider that there continues to be a large influx of immigrants from parts of the world that value these same attributes even more so than do current North Americans. Now ask yourself, what does this mean for the assortments of the future?
Planning now for an assortment that includes flavours from around the world and heavy to organic and fairly-traded products could position any retail company into that highly sought after assortment leadership position. Convincing your supplier partners to grow, produce and otherwise source these products locally might just make that retail company legendary.
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