Organic Produce Requires Visual Merchandising

When you enter a supermarket, what's the first thing that attracts you? Generally, it's the produce department. Why is that? Probably because the department is located up front and all the colors draw attention to the visual presentation.

The fresh produce department is one of the prime factors consumers choose a particular store to do their overall food shopping. Close to 75% of shoppers claim fresh produce quality and assortment are most important in making that decision.

Consumers are very much up on the latest trends. Most shoppers prefer healthy foods and stores that are involved with protecting the environment. Those same customers want fresh organic produce options and most will not shop in a store if those choices are unavailable.

Visual merchandising enhances customer eye-appeal

Considering these main factors, what you do in handling and promoting organic produce makes a big difference in drawing customers to your store. But most importantly, it has to convince them to keep coming back.

One of the most benefiting ways to influence customers is in the visual merchandising of the organic produce section in the department. The product presentation should attract customers and persuade them to make purchases of the entire category line.

Recent trends show that 62 percent of consumers buy items on impulse that they didn't plan to purchase while shopping in the store. Most likely, theses customers were influenced by the visual merchandising of displays.

The objective is to draw customers over to attractive displays and entice them to buy those items. I call this strategy "display psychology."

Some retailers prefer the segregated organic sections and others lean towards the integrated format. Segregated sections expose more of the entire visual while the integrated system softens it. 

Product placement is important. There should be two standard organic sections — wall section for refrigerated items and a dry table section for non-required refrigerated items such as apples, citrus, etc.

You need to enhance the artistic appeal of the organic fresh fruit and vegetable sections. Once you do that, it will have the opportunity to build customer traffic.  But it has to have the creative visual elements in order to induce plenty of those sales.

Here are five basic fundamentals to trigger that visual merchandising:

Concentrate on boosting your organic produce by showing it off. Place at least one weekly featured organic item up front along with the advertised conventional specials.  This will make the local organic community aware that your company promotes healthy eating.

The more you support popular trending products by making them visible, the more your organic customers will choose your store as their main shopping preference.

If your organic options are minimal and you don't have devoted sections available, customers will perceive it as negative. Those customers will simply open their wallets at your competitors.

You have only two choices — advance along with the organic growth or suffer the consequences of a sales deficit.

Apply visual merchandising to your organic program now.