TradeUSA Newsletter

NEW YORK (AP) — A revamped nutrition facts panel designed to make it easier for Americans to see how many calories and added sugars are in packaged foods and drinks is being delayed.

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday it plans to push back the deadline for a rule requiring food companies to use the new label. It’s the Trump administration’s latest delay of the Obama administration’s rules intended to improve food labeling and make foods healthier and safer.

The revised nutrition facts panel would make the calorie counts on packaged food and drinks more prominent, adjust serving sizes to be more realistic and specify the amount of added sugars in products. The labels currently list how many total sugars are in a product, including those that are naturally occurring, such as in fruit and milk.

Previously, the FDA had given companies until July 26, 2018, to comply, with smaller food makers getting an extra year. On Tuesday, the FDA said it intends to give companies additional time to be in compliance. It did not provide a specific deadline. Spokeswoman Deborah Kotz said in an email that details will be released at a later date.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association and other industry groups had asked for the deadline to be pushed to 2021, according to a letter sent earlier this year to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who was appointed by President Donald Trump. The letter was obtained by the health advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest.

In a statement, the Grocery Manufacturers Association said food and beverage companies want to help people make informed choices, but the “fast-approaching compliance deadline” was difficult to meet without final guidance from the FDA on certain details. For instance, the association noted that the FDA still needs to evaluate whether some commonly used ingredients in food products can continue to be counted as fiber on the new panel.

Read more here.

Source: CBS News

Σε κάθε κατηγορία προϊόντων, περίπου το 10% των καταναλωτών αντιπροσωπεύει το 30% έως 70% των πωλήσεων. Αυτού του είδους οι καταναλωτές ονομάζονται «super-consumers».

Οι super-consumers, για παράδειγμα, που αρέσκονται στην κατανάλωση hot dog, τρώνε πέντε κιλά μηνιαίως ενώ φθάνουν να καταναλώσουν μέχρι και 4 hot dog ανά γεύμα. Επίσης, «super-consumers» είναι οι χρήστες συρραπτικών που κατέχουν 8 διαφορετικά είδη, οι οποίοι ξέρουν τι θέλουν και θα αγοράσουν πολλά από αυτά ενώ είναι διατεθειμένοι να πληρώσουν παραπάνω από τον μέσο αγοραστή για να τα αποκτήσουν.

Ως γενικά χαρακτηριστικά, είναι παθιασμένοι και αφοσιωμένοι -μερικές φορές παρουσιάζουν και τάσεις εμμονής- ενώ υπάρχουν σε κάθε κατηγορία, από τα αναψυκτικά και τα αεροπορικά ταξίδια έως τα προϊόντα γρήγορου φαγητού και στοματικής φροντίδας. Αυτοί οι αφοσιωμένοι και διορατικοί καταναλωτές:

• ψάχνουν με ενθουσιασμό νέα προϊόντα
• πληρώνουν με ευχαρίστηση premium τιμές
• ψωνίζουν από την κατηγορία συχνά
• διαθέτουν γνώση του κλάδου άνω του μέσου καταναλωτή
• είναι περισσότερο δεκτικοί σε μηνύματα marketing
• εκφράζουν τις ανάγκες τους που βρίσκονται σε λανθάνουσα μορφή

 Ο «super-consumer» στον Κλάδο Αρτοποιίας

Αποτελούν το 20% των νοικοκυριών που κινούν το 24% της συνολικής δαπάνης αρτοσκευασμάτων:

• Ξοδεύουν 2.4 φορές περισσότερο ($357/έτος) με τον μέσο καταναλωτή να ξοδεύει ($143/έτος)
• Αγοράζουν 6 υποκατηγορίες από 6 διαφορετικά καταστήματα λιανεμπορίου

Η αποτελεσματικότερη ενημέρωση των «super-consumers» για την κατανάλωση και χρήση των προϊόντων άρτου θα μπορούσε να αυξήσει τον δείκτη δαπάνης στο 170, έχοντας ως αποτέλεσμα η βιομηχανία αρτοποιίας θα μπορούσε να σημειώσει δυνητική ανάπτυξη 14% ή αλλιώς να φθάσει στα $1.4 δις. σε πωλήσεις.

Ο «super-consumer» στον Κλάδο Deli

Αποτελούν το 19% των νοικοκυριών που κινούν το 24% της συνολικής deli δαπάνης.

• Ξοδεύουν 2.4 φορές περισσότερο ($481/έτος) με τον μέσο καταναλωτή να ξοδεύει ($187/έτος)
• Αγοράζουν 7 υποκατηγορίες και ψωνίζουν από 6 διαφορετικά καταστήματα λιανεμπορίου

Η αποτελεσματικότερη ενημέρωση των «super-consumers» για τη διαθεσιμότητα των προϊόντων στα grocery stores, τα οποία προσφέρουν μεγαλύτερη ποικιλία τροφίμων σε χαμηλότερες τιμές από τα παραδοσιακά fast casual εστιατόρια. Οι συχνότερες επισκέψεις στα prepared food stores σε συνδυασμό με την αύξηση του δείκτη δαπάνης στο 170 θα μπορούσε, ο κλάδος Deli, να σημειώσει ανάπτυξη 15% ή αλλιώς να φθάσει στα $2.6 δις. σε πωλήσεις.

Ο «super-consumer» στον Κλάδο Τυροκομικών

Αποτελούν το 10%  των νοικοκυριών που κινούν το 23% της συνολικής δαπάνης στο τυρί.

• Ξοδεύουν 2.3 φορές περισσότερο ($351/ χρόνο) με τον μέσο καταναλωτή να ξοδεύει ($177 /έτος)
• Αγοράζουν 10 υποκατηγορίες από 4 διαφορετικά καταστήματα λιανεμπορίου

Η αποτελεσματικότερη ενημέρωση των «super-consumers» για την χρήση των τυροκομικών προϊόντων, όπως για παράδειγμα ότι μια κατεψυγμένη πίτσα μπορεί να βελτιωθεί με specialty cheese ή άλλα είδη deli και να κοστίσει λιγότερο από μια έτοιμη/φρέσκια πίτσα σε εστιατόριο, μπορούν να ενισχύσουν τις πωλήσεις του κλάδου. Συγκεκριμένα, ενημερώσεις αυτού του τύπου μπορούν να πραγματοποιηθούν με την αυξήσει του δείκτη δαπάνης στο 175 και να έχουν ως αποτέλεσμα η βιομηχανία τυροκομικών να σημειώσει ανάπτυξη 12% ή αλλιώς να φθάσει στα $2.3 δις. σε πωλήσεις.

Το Τμήμα TradeUSA του Ελληνο-Αμερικανικού Εμπορικού Επιμελητηρίου ξεκίνησε σε συνεργασία με την International Dairy-Deli Bakery Association (IDDBA), το Cambridge Group και τη Nielsen Homescan  έρευνα αγοράς απευθυνόμενο σε λιανέμπορους και παραγωγούς με σκοπό να αναλύσει και να παρουσιάσει τη νέα κατηγορία καταναλωτή που ονομάζεται «super-consumer». Οι κατηγορίες τροφίμων και ποτών όπου θα αναλυθούν το επόμενο διάστημα θα αφορά τα αρτοσκευάσματα, γαλακτοκομικά, τα delicatessen και τα έτοιμα γεύματα. Η έρευνα αγοράς θα σκιαγραφεί τόσο τι προκαλεί τον ενθουσιασμό των καταναλωτών αλλά και τους τρόπους που χρησιμοποιούν το φαγητό ώστε να βελτιώσουν τις ζωές τους. Συνολικά, η έρευνα αγοράς θα ολοκληρωθεί/παρουσιασθεί το 2018 όπου θα εμπεριέχει ποσοτικά και ποιοτικά χαρακτηριστικά στις προαναφερθείσες κατηγορίες οδηγώντας σε πιθανές καινοτομίες στην παραγωγή των προϊόντων.

Γιάννης Μωύσογλου
Υπεύθυνος Εξαγωγών “TradeUSA”, Ελληνο-Αμερικανικό Εμπορικό Επιμελητήριο

Global food prices rose 10 percent in May 2017 compared to May 2016, and 2.2 percent from April 2017, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which gauged the international prices of a basket of food commodities. Rising shipping costs and larger import volumes are expected to push the total cost of global food imports to more than $1.3 trillion for 2017. Vegetable oils, dairy products, and meats increased in price, while sugar and cereals dropped.

Sugar prices were impacted by higher-than-expected sugar output in Brazil, combined with a weakening of the Brazilian Real, which discouraged crush for ethanol in the domestic market in favor of more lucrative sugar exports. Expectations of larger exports from Pakistan and China’s decision to impose high duties on imports beyond its WTO tariff-rate quota commitment exerted additional downward pressure on international sugar prices.

Source: Specialty Food Association

Columnist James Green discusses the trends that are impacting struggling brick-and-mortar retailers and the strategies brands need to implement to survive.

Once upon a time, brick-and-mortar malls were the center of many people’s lives. Families would go to movies, adolescents would socialize with friends, and there were lots of places to buy everything from groceries to garments. Many of the anchor stores — like Sears, Macy’s or Best Buy — served as aggregators of brand-name products.

Things are far different for retailers today — so different, in fact, that brick-and-mortar retail is under a massive three-pronged attack:

1. People are staying home to watch entertainment

Movie attendance is down. Last September, Business Insider cited sales as flat year-over-year and expected attendance to fall by 3.5 percent, not because people are not watching entertainment — we consume tons of that — but because we consume (or binge) our entertainment at home. So it’s been very hard to get movie theaters to be the anchor tenant for a mall.

Impact on retailers: Fewer people visit malls.

2. We love our brands

Increasingly, brands have been selling directly to the consumer. Years ago, both Apple and the Disney Store pioneered this trend.

Today, more and more brands have their own stores and don’t sell through aggregators. Success in fashion retailing is Zara and Uniqlo, not Macy’s or Nordstrom. And if a fashion retailer is too small to own stores, then it sells directly to you online: American Giant is a classic example.

Brands that have successfully opened the direct-to-consumer channel have reaped benefits in sales and brand loyalty. Companies as diverse as Nike and Nestlé have called out these strategies in their investor calls. Nestlé CFO Francois-Xavier Roger touted the company’s success in direct-to-consumer by referencing an increase in e-commerce sales from 2.9 percent in 2012 to 5 percent in 2017.

The nail in the coffin of retail aggregation is the notoriously low profit margins — but margins are better on owned brands. This monumental shift in the industry has dramatically changed both the number of stores that brands maintain, as well as how brands as a whole engage with consumers.

Impact on retailers: Fewer people visit malls; stores are smaller and brand-centric as opposed to brand aggregators.

3. Convenience always wins out

Everyone wants instant gratification. If Amazon is prepared to ship something to you for free with your Amazon Prime membership — and let you watch free movies while you wait for it to be delivered — then why go to the mall?

Today, over 40 percent of all US households have Amazon Prime, and memberships are concentrated in the higher income households, which are the very people that kept malls alive.

Impact on retailers: Fewer people buying in physical locations.

The shift from physical store to e-commerce

What’s the upshot of all of this? More than 3,000 stores are expected to close this year. Many brands that seemed impervious are now imperiled. These include massive retailers such as Sears, Macy’s and Radio Shack. These closings have a direct correlation with our ability to bring in products to our homes — products that used to be bought or consumed in brick-and-mortar stores.

Recent government statistics say that online sales are only about 10 percent of total sales, but this percentage greatly underestimates the real number. For example, these numbers include gasoline sales (a product almost never sold online). The inclusion of gasoline warps categories like entertainment and clothing, where online is most prominent.

Today, the master of modern retail is clearly Amazon. But look to food delivery service Grubhub and the entire travel industry for inspiration about how to make online sales work.

It’s possible to be an aggregator, but each vertical tends to only support one or two of them. If you have Amazon in retail; Orbitz, Expedia, Priceline, Kayak in travel; and Grubhub in food delivery, how are you going to be the big winner in your category if you aggregate multiple brands?

It’s easier to focus on your own brands if you have them and let other brands worry about theirs. Take a look at this list of companies, and tell me what they have in common: Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Staples, Home Depot and Netflix. Don’t know? According to Trellis, they sit within the top 10 most successful e-commerce companies, and they all show double-digit e-commerce growth.

If you want to survive in the new world, you need to have a plan to ensure growth of online sales.

If doing business in the retail industry is uncomfortable, it’s because nearly every standard business practice around engaging customers and selling to them is being disrupted. The store model from 25 years ago doesn’t work for the showrooming of today.

Understanding how to make the shift from physical store to e-commerce is important, and once you make that shift, there are strategies and technologies that help you realize sales in what we all find ourselves in: a whole new retail world — a world where you’d better be online and you’d better be selling your own brand.

Source: www.marketingland.com

There is no question that the retail industry is under-going a tremendous amount of change. Record numbers of store closings. Legacy brands going out of business–or teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Venture capital funded start-ups wreaking havoc upon traditional distribution models and pricing structures. Discount-oriented retailers stealing share away from once mighty department stores. And, oh yeah, then there’s Amazon.

In assessing what is driving retailers’ shifting fortunes most observers point to a single factor: the rapid growth of e-commerce. But they’d be wrong.

To be sure, online shopping has, and will continue to have, a dramatic impact on virtually every aspect of retail. One simply cannot ignore the dramatic share shift from physical stores to digital commerce, nor can we under-estimate the transformative effect of e-commerce on pricing, product availability and shopping convenience.

Yet a far more profound dynamic is at play, namely what some have termed “digital-first retail.” Digital-first retail is the growing tendency of consumers’ shopping journeys to be influenced by digital channels, regardless of where the ultimate transaction takes place. It’s obvious that this shift helps explain the success of Amazon and other e-commerce players. But when it comes to how traditional retailers need to reinvent themselves, several factors related to this phenomenon need to be better understood and, most importantly, acted upon.

Digitally-influenced brick & mortar sales dwarf e-commerce. While e-commerce now accounts for (depending on the source) some 10% of all retail sales, both Forrester and Deloitte have estimated that web-influenced physical store sales are about 5X online sales.

Source: www.forbes.com

Plastics and packaging are nearly synonymous. Packaging of all types from food and beverage to consumer goods to durables makes use of plastics because of its durability, consumer friendliness, sustainability and recyclability into myriad new products.

PET is one of the primary materials used for packaging, and the PET packaging marketing is forecast to reach 21.2 million tons by 2021 with sustainability and lightweighting expected to play a major role in the development of the industry, according to a report by Smithers Pira. In 2016, PET packaging amounted to just under 16.7 million tons, representing a 3.8% increase from 2015. Growth for 2016 was projected to reach 4.8%, amounting to 17.5 million tons, with demand coming from new product developments in markets such as preserved foods (think Milacron’s Klear Can and Sonoco’s TruVue); thermoformed food containers; fruit juice containers; and other beverage packaging.

However, recent studies of consumers’ food-buying habits are showing that many are moving away from canned goods and toward fresh fruits and produce and prepared meals from the supermarket deli counter. Additionally, big-name food brands are losing shelf space to local or regional brands and smaller start-ups. Market research firm Nielsen said in a May 1 Wall Street Journal report that “sales for packaged food and products—reflecting the number of items sold—fell 2.4% in the first quarter of 2017.

Another recent market study from Ceresana focuses on global plastic films. The report from the international market research and industry consultancy noted that “packaging is supposed to be light and handy, neat and durable, microwaveable and also environmentally friendly.” Oliver Kutsch, CEO of Ceresana, said, “sales of plastic films will presumably reach a volume of about $250 billion until 2024. That’s a lot of packaging, and there are several “megatrends” that are driving this sector.

Millennials aren’t just changing the employment picture—they are changing food tastes, as well, which is having an impact on the major processed food producers and the packaging industry. A number of surveys have revealed that millennials want fresh produce and meat; they want simple food—real food—and are moving away from processed food with too many ingredients including additives and preservatives that promise a longer shelf and refrigerator life. They also look to sustainability in packaging: Is it recyclable? Compostable? Biodegradable?

The processed food producers want to satisfy these changing consumer tastes. To do that they are looking for advanced packaging technology that plastics provide, such as multi-layer barrier film that blocks oxygen and prevents food spoilage. This means less food waste, which is a big goal for many in the packaging industry.

Read More Here.

Source: www.plasticstoday.com

The GMO debate rages on.

As part of the budget deal that prevented a government shutdown last week, the FDA will fund a new campaign to combat what they perceive as misinformation about GMOs in our food.

The budget deal gave the FDA $3 million dollars to provide “consumer outreach and education regarding agricultural biotechnology,” which includes information on genetically engineered food. They’ll supposedly use the money to try to show the positive side of GMOs—which make up 80 percent of maize and soybean crops planted in the U.S.—including their “environmental, nutritional, food safety, economic, and humanitarian impacts.”

In April of last year, more than 50 food industry groups signed a letter expressing their support for the proposed campaign, hoping that it would “better inform the public about the application of biotechnology to food and agricultural production,” arguing that “all major scientific bodies, including all federal health agencies, have said that genetically engineered foods are safe.”

There was a plenty of pushback against the campaign before this budget passed: State Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York argued that a community outreach program of this kind would be nothing more than a state-funded propaganda campaign for the GMO industry.

It’s still unclear what kind of educational programs the FDA plans to implement, or even when they will launch, but the parameters are broad for what they’re allowed to do: All they’re required to do is collaborate with the Department of Agriculture, and distribute “science-based educational information,” to the public.

There does seem to be a gap between the public and scientific perception of GMOs: Pew found that 88 percent of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science agree that GMOs are safe to eat. Only 37 percent of the American public agrees.

But the politicians who advocate for this campaign aren’t just looking to inform the public—they have their own interests in mind, too: Take State Representative Robert B. Aderholt, a Republican from Alabama. His campaign received $10,000 from Monsanto in 2016, a company that would greatly benefit from a public more open to eating genetically modified food.

Even if GMOs are safe to eat, they still have problems. For instance, soy farmers who plant genetically modified crops use 28 percent more herbicide than those who don’t. And last October, a thorough New York Times report found that GMO crops don’t significantly increase food production, as promised.

Now that the federal government has taken a clear side on the complex debate over whether or not GMOs are helping  our economy and our health or not, it seems as though we can look forward to a future shaped by genetically engineered products—whether we’re ready for them or not.

Find our FDA Services here.

Source: www.forbes.com