America’s supermarkets are rapidly changing
NUTLEY, N.J. — “We’ve come in the back door,” writer Michael Ruhlman said as we entered the chill of the ShopRite supermarket here. “We should be over there, in produce.”
Apologizing to shoppers trying to steer carts toward the exit we had just entered, we made our way to the produce section, where the first thing that caught our attention was the floor. While the middle of the store was carpeted in a grayish linoleum, here was a warm-colored fake wood: our initial clue that fruit and vegetables carried a special cachet.
“This I always find fascinating, that people will actually buy green bananas,” Ruhlman said, noting that consumers who make one big food-shopping trip each week prefer greener bananas that keep longer.
Ruhlman is the author of several books, most of them about cooking and chefs. It’s a predilection he ascribes to his father, Rip Ruhlman, who did the food shopping for the family and who makes frequent appearances in his son’s latest book, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America.
But while the ever-expanding supermarkets that his father shopped still exist, they are in the midst of an existential crisis.
Shoppers are increasingly shunning the processed, packaged products that fill most of the shelves in the center of the store. Instead, they are hunting the perimeter for fresh fruits and vegetables, yogurts and cheeses, and prepared foods that go way beyond the traditional rotisserie chicken.
Competition is fierce, as retailers like Wal-Mart, Target and 7-Eleven sell groceries, and Amazon and Fresh Direct deliver to the doorstep.
Nielsen, a research and consulting firm, said last month that for the first time in a decade, shoppers were making more trips to stores but coming out with less in their baskets. “They’re not stockpiling their pantries as much,” said Jordan Ross, the company’s vice president for consumer insights.
None of this comes as a surprise to Ruhlman, 53, who grew up in the Cleveland area and just moved to Manhattan to join novelist Ann Hood, whom he married last month. His new book is as much an indictment of the traditional supermarket’s role as it is about the evolution of the model.
The growing sales of produce and prepared foods are a silver lining for supermarkets, which make a much higher profit margin from produce — about 40 percent for prepared foods, compared with about 20 percent in the store overall, said Phil Lempert, the grocery-retailing expert who calls himself the Supermarket Guru.
But grocers still face a quandary: how to maintain a huge store whose center is filled with items that are largely out of step with how we eat today.
Ruhlman predicts that much of what is sold in the center of the store — the cereal, canned soups, detergents and Ziploc bags — will be largely bought online in the not-too-distant future as food shoppers become more accustomed to e-commerce. And he believes that many supermarkets will simply get smaller, as people order more online and consumers buy groceries from more places.