Can self-serve make a comeback?

It was a Friday in mid-march when things started to unravel for Sara Simply Sampling. The firm, which runs in-store sampling for some of the biggest supermarket chains in Western Canada, was operating 21 wine tasting booths in 21 Save- Onfoods stores in British Columbia. But the samplers were calling head office, saying the stores were wild with shoppers bulk-buying dry goods, but few were stopping for a free drink.

Costco had just cancelled its renowned in-store food sampling program. Tim Murphy, Sara Simply’s vice-president of sales and marketing, knew more cancellations were coming.

And by the afternoon of March 13, his contact at Save-on-foods was calling to say: “Today will be the last day of demos.” The 36-yearold, family-run firm hasn’t seen any revenue since.

The end of demos coincided with the end of olive bars, and salad bars, hot counters and buffets in grocery stores. Three months removed from that, it’s hard to picture going back to a time when you would touch a communal olive spoon or accept a paper cup of lactose-free yogurt from a stranger.

But the samplers, like the purveyors of salad bars, buffets and hot tables, are working on a comeback. The struggle for each is the same: How does self-serve survive when no one wants to touch anything?

“It’s an interesting dilemma,” said Jean-pierre Lacroix, president of Shikatani Lacroix, a firm that works on store design for Canadian supermarkets. “How do you sample products when consumers don’t want to touch them?”

Sampling in stores, Lacroix said, is a crucial marketing tool for food manufacturers, who can see huge spikes in sales whenever one of their products is sampled. And it is also a revenue generator for the supermarkets, which often charge fees for the demos, he said. Sara Simply, for instance, said one instore sampling program can boost a product’s sales by up to 350 per cent in a weekend. The Retail Council of Canada confirmed that number “is not out of line.”

Last week, the sampling world received reason to hope. CDS Canada, which runs the sampling at Costco stores, announced it had begun tests in two locations. Those tests involved new procedures around social distancing, as well as piloting a method that doesn’t involve eating or drinking at all: The talking food demo.