Sara Lee Monitors the Bread Aisle

Rosemont, Ill. — The Sara Lee brand fresh bakery business garnered increased sales, higher profits and an enhanced reputation for effective category management thanks to insights gained from VideoMining's "Center Store MegaStudy," released in 2011, according to Kyle Reynolds, former director, category management and insights, Sara Lee.Presenting at the Shopper Technology Institute's LEAD Marketing Conference in October 2012, Reynolds said Sara Lee was able to better understand shopping patterns for its inline bread sections. Higher sales were gained by putting bread on endcaps, which are typically not used for the bread and roll categories, and those dollars were determined to be incremental. "We found that bread held its own in terms of the number of shoppers buying off the endcaps," Reynolds said.State College, Pa.-based VideoMining positions as many as 150 inconspicuous cameras in the ceiling of stores and analyzes data gleaned from videos for shopping patterns and category insights, comparing it with data from the point-of-sale.Reynolds said that Sara Lee was an early user of VideoMining in 2010, and since has moved up in the Kantar Retail PoweRanking for consumer/shopper insights and category management – from 26th in 2008 and eighth in 2010. In late 2011, then-Sara Lee Corp. sold its fresh bakery business to Bimbo Bakeries USA, Horsham, Pa.According to co-presenter Tom Sullivan, VideoMining president, the "Center Store MegaStudy" found that the average shopping trip takes 13 minutes – 10 minutes shopping and three minutes at checkout. Shoppers spend two-and-a-half minutes navigating the store, five minutes shopping the perimeter of the store and two minutes, 16 seconds shopping the center store. Yet, Sullivan said, 79% of people go through the center store, 75% shop it, "but 27% of the people who come through the center store shop don't buy." Sullivan calls this shopper leakage, which eventually leads to channel leakage. "You can't see it unless you put cameras on these people," he added.Sara Lee started using VideoMining's services in only two stores, one on the West Coast with the bread category on the perimeter and one on the East Coast with the bread category in a center aisle, Reynolds said. He would not identify the two chains, but Sullivan reported that VideoMining's store panel now includes Kroger, Safeway and Ahold in grocery; and 7-Eleven, Circle K and ampm in convenience.In an early finding, VideoMining determined that the perimeter was exposed to 41% of people in the store, while the center aisle section was only seen by 27%.With that statistic as ammunition, Reynolds sought to convince more retailers to put bread on the perimeter, which wasn't always possible, often because of the store layout. "You've got a big, powerful category, which is the second most profitable category in the store, so try and get it on the perimeter as you design your store," he said. The fresh bakery category has the highest shopper-to-buyer conversion rate of any of the categories VideoMining monitors. "If shoppers engaged in the category, chances are seven in 10 of them are going to buy that product," Reynolds said.But VideoMining found that the overall average number of shoppers entering the bread aisle in all stores is 55%. "So 45% of the people who come through the front door don't go down the bread aisle; 45% of the store traffic never gets exposed to this big powerful category," Reynolds said.A major insight came when Reynolds focused on the stores with bread in the center aisles. "I knew intuitively that a lot of people were shopping these interior aisles from the back of the store," he said. "What really surprised me was that 71% entered the aisles from the back of the store and 69% exited from the back of the aisle. So they were doing a U-turn. If they are doing a U-turn, you really have to understand how you are flowing your different products in that aisle to optimize your sales and profits."Reynolds says that a review of the product flow of these departments needs to take white bread into account because it is the most frequently purchased product in the category, as well as the lowest in price and profit. "If it was first in the flow, shoppers would grab that item, do a U-turn and leave, and I would lose out on the potential sale of secondary segments like bagels, English muffins, buns and our premium products."

Sara Lee Monitors the Bread Aisle

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