DISCUSSION
Could a ‘breakfast aisle’ revitalize the grocery center store?
Written by Guest contributor
Photo: RetailWire
Linda Winick
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters.
The Kellogg Company has come up with what it calls "The Breakfast Aisle," a rearranging of the brightly colored boxes of the typical cereal aisle to add toaster pastries and breakfast bars to the array of hot and cold cereals.
Optimal adjacencies in the re-imagined cereal aisle promise to give grocers the ability to cross-merchandize products.
“As we looked at what interacted with cereal, it became very, very clear what the best arrangement of cereal was, and what that morning food aisle should look like,” Stacey Ring-Sanders, vice president of category strategy and development for the Kellogg Company explained in a presentation last month at the annual conference of the Category Management Association (CMA) in Las Vegas. “There were things out there in the marketplace that didn’t make a lot of sense. We wanted to start looking at what were the best adjacencies to drive purchases that relate to that morning food occasion.”
Ms. Ring-Sanders believes that the change represents an evolution in category management. What was a product category 10 years ago is no longer a category today in many cases, according to Ms. Ring-Sanders. As a result of the regroupings, Kellogg’s later learned that shoppers were indeed looking at the other categories more when they were arranged together versus when they were in separate aisles.
In the larger sense, she said, trading partners need to look at the store differently because very few category shelf changes will have significant impact on sales. CPG companies need to look at holistic solutions for retailers that impact not just their categories, but also the total store.
“Gone are the days of category only,” she explained. “People are not just eating cereal for breakfast nowadays; they’re eating a multitude of other things. Instead of focusing on cereal, Kellogg’s realized they needed to start talking to retailers about aisle management, and not just category management.”