On arriving in India
the organised retail is having concerns about selling fresh
vegetables which is
a high-margin,
high-risk and perishable product. Prasanjit Ray, Founder and CEO
of In-store Consulting Services, has observed that in a
supermarket though
there are beverages, chocolates, dairy products and
vegetables and fruits, most
shoppers skip the fruit and vegetables altogether. One of his continuous
studies has shown that a significant quantum of supermarket shoppers is
regulars. This means that though people are going to the same supermarket again
and again they may not be buying fresh vegetables from there. As a student of
shopping he began to look at some of the vital parameters of fresh shopping and
compared them with shopping other products. He found that the biggest component
of fresh shopping at the wet market or at the door step cart is seller interaction
or talking to the seller. No other product category in the fast moving segment
takes in so much of seller interaction as fresh. Next, shopping for fresh has
the highest product interaction to price ratio among all the fast moving
products. This means that for every rupee spent of buying any fast moving
products the buyers touch and feel the vegetables the most number of times. What
do these two parameters, put together, indicate? First, there is a great need
to assure the buyers that what they are buying is of good quality because
unlike a packet of biscuits or a can of drink or a jar of edible oil that come
with the quality assurance, items like bitter gourd , don’t come with that.
This is also the reason for the interaction with the seller. Fresh shopping
also has another characteristic, the variety involved in a single shopping and
purchase occasion. There is a similarity between how vegetables and how
snack-items are bought. In both cases buyers don’t just buy all of one thing
but little of many things. Imagine, how
it would feel to buy biscuits from a shelf stocked with just thin arrowroot or
glucose biscuits? Same goes for pumpkin, papaya or potatoes unless the buyers
need to buy great quantity. Another similarity between the two is the way buyers
shop for them. When people start shopping they don’t look for something
specific. They merely browse until something catches their fancy. The important
aspect is that they like to browse a range of vegetables together in one place
and select on the basis of how they look. Timing is yet another important
parameter of fresh shopping. It is not the first thing people buy in a
supermarket especially when they have to also shop for other things. If a fresh
products section is somewhere in the middle of the super market, it happens
that many skirt or skip it and go straight to the check out counters. As such a
fresh material section is almost always placed near the check out section.
Another thing is while groceries are purchased once a month, vegetables and other
fresh items are purchased frequently. It is only as and when people start going
to the supermarkets more often then they would start finding more natural
reasons to shop for fresh vegetables as well. This would be the time when
nuances of buying or selling fresh vegetables through retail would gain
prominence. Display of fresh vegetables can also have its own influences. One
supermarket has installed a replica of a vegetable vendor’s cart laden with
fresh vegetables. Such displays, with frequent sprinkling of water and weeding
out the tired and soggy vegetables, would help selling fresh vegetables in
retails grow.