Summer weather encourages customers to get out and enjoy themselves—or stay home and entertain. Make sure your grocery store is well-stocked with summer favorites that accommodate both. Here’s what’s in season now, and how to market it so that your baskets sell out—well before the fruit flies come in.
Picnic Foods
Summer is synonymous with picnics on the lawn, backyard barbecues, and lazy days at the beach. But none of these would be complete without delicious summer fruits like watermelon and corn. Watermelons are 90% water, by weight, making them the perfect thirst-quenchers for hot summer days. Cucumbers are another refreshing summer fruit, often mistaken for a vegetable, that every picnic salad needs. Grapes and cantaloupes are in season, too, as well as blueberries and blackberries, which customers crave for their sweetness.
Orchard Fruits
One of the best summer day trips consists of driving to a local orchard and picking (and sampling) the season’s produce straight from the trees. But day trips are a once in a while thing, so a walk to the neighborhood grocery store is second best. Right about now, your apples, apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, and nectarines should look their most tempting.
Savory Specials
While sweet summer fruits get a lot of attention, let’s not forget the savory produce that makes summer recipes sizzle to life. These include eggplant, sweet peppers, potatoes, and shallots.
Marketing Your Summer Bounty
With their bright colors and hint of fragrance, your summer produce will do much to sell itself, but to help things along, here’s are some no-fail tips to market your summer specials:
- Convenient recipes. Recipes help customers choose and commit to their produce choices, especially when they come in undecided about what to buy. Recipe ideas may also encourage customers to purchase more than they originally intended. Try printing convenient recipe cards and placing them along your produce aisle, or highlighting a recipe of the week for display. Recipes may also be featured in emails and your website.
- Live cooking demos. Clear out a space for a professional chef to come in and prepare a seasonal salad or pasta with the flavors of summer. Few things are more inspiring to a customer than watching and smelling ingredients come together to create delicious meals they’d love to serve and enjoy in their own kitchens.
- Free samples. If anything tops watching the food get made, it’s tasting it. Sliced fruit makes a great sample, as well as bite-sized chunks of pie made with your seasonal fruit.
- Daily featured product. Choose one summer item to show off for an entire day—or week. Create signage that highlights the special and endow your customers with plenty of fun facts, agricultural trivia, featured recipes, as well as discounts or bulk savings on that goodie.
What fruits and veggies sold best last year? With Revel’s Intelligent Reporting feature, find easy-to-read data on sales numbers, broken down by product and time period. You’ll have all the information you need to make the best decisions for your business, whatever the season.
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