Connecting trends in food culture to long-term portfolio strategy at the enterprise level is one of the most critical obligations of today’s food/beverage executives. We have a set of proprietary tools to do this that focuses on long-term growth and health, not short-term gains.
The majority of legacy brands are not keeping up with market growth rates. Some will never grow again. Some are simply out of touch. Knowing the cultural positioning of your brands in your category is critical to charting strategies to either stabilize, grow or harvest.
Is your new concept just new or is it going to generate real long-term demand? Our proprietary processes are designed to deliver long-term growth through new product pipelines.
The future is never predictable, but the likely future scenarios are knowable. Every 2-3 years we update our food market scenarios. We use them to help clients get their portfolios and brands ready to adapt to an uncertain future.
Smart growth strategy in food and beverage requires understanding which leading-edge trends are scalable and which will likely remain niche. We take understanding the difference very seriously.
Understanding food consumption requires placing it in a broad cultural context. We deploy professional anthropological techniques to understand the drivers behind how consumers shop for food and beverage and how they eat and drink.
As leaders in the study of American food culture, The Hartman Group has been tracking how Americans shop for food since the 1990s. From one-stop shopping to multichannel shopping to online markets and click-and-collect, we continue to track consumers’ evolving perceptions, needs, habits and relationships with food retailers. New to the 2017 report is a special section on the expansion of the discount grocery channel, the emerging fresh-format channel and smaller-footprint retail formats.