What's In-Store: June Update

Hello, and welcome to our June newsletter.

This month: the most expensive strawberries ever grown, the new way to consume supplements, Walmart’s in-store beauty associates, Energy Drinks flying off the shelves in the face of “the health movement”, and how to innovate in a 155-year old brand.

As always, if you see anything you like, dislike, or have a way better opinion than me, please hit reply. We’d love to hear what category challenges you’re navigating.

May’s Interesting Things

• Patches - the new Health Gummies? - Last month we wrote about Gruns, the vitamin gummy brand, being acquired by Unilever. Well move over gummies, it seems patches are the new way to take your supplements. Barriere has just completed a fundraise and launched into Walmart. The scientific bit of patches > gummies - supposedly easier to absorb and less gets lost in your gut / digestive system. The real reason these will do well - imagine wearing your wellness routine so that others can see it. Yes, obviously I think that sounds awful and couldn’t imagine anything worse BUT, In the social media age, these things matter to people who are, unlike me, actually culturally relevant.
• Walmart In-Store Beauty Associates - Walmart is expanding its Beauty expert associate roles from 22-stores to 425 stores by the end of this year. These can be such huge drivers of shopper experience and proven trade-ups in-store. For all of the praise on Walmart’s tech-focused achievements, the store is still its heartland and where it can compete with Amazon most effectively. These sorts of initiatives cement their position. To put some exact numbers on it, a previous trial in another grocer showed that adding in-store associates in a wine aisle increased category sales by +30%. It’s rare to find that significant a category driver.
• Monster Energy Drinks in Strong Growth - Total sales increased by 27%, driven by international growth of +45%. Impressive numbers, but why should we care? Energy drinks are a sort of microcosm of the industry right now. Whilst much of the industry is focused on GLP-1s, Make America Healthy Again, and avoiding seed oils, there is still a huge shopper base for easy, less healthy options. Energy drinks still have “healthy shoppers” (hello, gym bros!) and “less healthy shoppers” (hello, gamers!). But this is still a big market and it’s growing significantly.
• Vaseline - How a 155-Year Old Brand Keeps Innovating - Co-creation with influencers, virality on platforms like TikTok. I was initially sceptical of Unilever’s claimed 50% of ad spend to go “digital with content creators”, which sounded nice as a press release but missed a lot of the “how and when”. It turns out, this has already been happening, and the practical reality is very smart, with the results to show for it.
• Oishii Raises $150m for Indoor Smart Farm Model - This latest fundraise takes their total amount raised to $320m. I’ve been negative in the past about the capex involved in AI companies, but that’s based on a promise of huge potential of the disruption of work and leisure. So far, this platform has used the technology to grow and sell strawberries. Yes, there’s a robotics play here, and I’d love to see the long-term vision, because so far, they grow and sell strawberries. At a valuation of what I assume is north of $1billion, that’s a lot of strawberries.

Upcoming Events

I’m excited to be speaking at IGD’s Future of Category Leadership Conference in London on 23rd June.

If you're planning to be there, let me know. We'll be sharing our latest AI-powered conversational analytics data platform in-person for the first time, and it is a game-changer.

I'll be joining the panel on technology's impact on category leadership, where I'll be talking about what horses, chess, and gramophones have in common with Retail Data AI Platforms. You know, the usual.

Tickets for the in-person part of the conference have sold out, but you can sign up to join virtually here.

Join Virtually

Webinar: Unlocking Visual Impact and Insights for CPGs

VST’s Ruby Wright joined dunnhumby and Unilever for a webinar on how to use visual impact to unlock great shopper insights. There are some great practical case studies on using Planogram Publisher to drive real changes in-store, including:

• Matching better shopping missions via tag mapping / heatmapping functionality on-shelf.
• Space to sales ratios for subcategory growth and reduction recommendations
• New product innovation visualisations
• Macro-space recommendations across superstore and convenience formats

Tune in whilst you can!

Watch Replay

And if there’s a category challenge on your mind that didn’t make this newsletter, please hit reply. I read everything!