Food Trends 2020: New Food Retail
Illustrations by JoEllen Martinson Davis
In the early days of quarantine, empty grocery store shelves revealed the fragility of the supply chain. To compensate, consumers turned online. Food e-commerce skyrocketed and the dwindling relevance of meal subscription services found a renewed purpose. But desperate times called for innovative thinking. Consumers were asking where else they can buy food; restaurants wondered what they could do with supplies that had no demand; and retailers searched for new solutions.
By late march, Panera bread opened Panera Grocery, which offers pantry staples and produce in addition to its full menu of fast casual meals. Local restaurants adopted a bodega-style approach, opening up their pantries and shifting menus to accommodate consumers looking for provisions to last the week or longer. Those restaurants with local suppliers reached out and became a conduit to help local farmers sell their stock and community members looking for grocery alternatives. Consumers also got creative, reaching out directly to local farmers for meat, dairy and eggs as a way to take out the middleman in the supply chain. In the UK, when the pandemic started, 3 million people ordered a vegetable box or direct from a farm for the first time (JWT Intelligence, Future 100, 2.0).
Schools, while shut down, began providing meals to families in their districts. While the response varied across districts, one family we spoke to said they signed up because it was encouraged – outside of food insecurity, the foods supplied were helpful with meal planning as parents navigated work and parenting from home. One nutrition program went so far as to include a family-sized recipe for the bulk produce provided in the weekly meal bag.
As the supply chain catches up, fears have turned from household food scarcity to saving local restaurants. Grocers teamed up with chefs to sell meal kits, and regional competitors like H-E-B in Texas and SpartanNash in Michigan started selling local restaurant fare from within their stores (Mintel, “the Impact of Covid-19 on Food and Drink Retailing, US, 2020). Here in the Twin Cities, local retailer Lunds & Byerly’s has introduced Eat St, which features local food trucks and their fare within the deli, bringing attention back to the hard-hit foodservice businesses.
These examples all speak to a sense of newly appreciated localism. The pandemic has revealed (or reminded us) of how much we rely on a complicated, national supply chain. Our local food businesses and suppliers showed agility and ingenuity when we needed it most. In some cases, it answered an immediate need while others innovated in unexpected ways to become, as in the case of Panera, a source of provisions outside of traditional food retail.