Reaching Hispanic Shoppers

Putting

Packaging First

Retailers often reevaluate packaging when cutting costs, but in today’s environment quality packaging can make or break a foodservice sale.

Tim Powell • Foodservice IP

Today, nearly half of operators

consider how a new food item will be packaged as part of the development process.

This percentage must grow, however, to keep foodservice humming, considering takeout and delivery have taken a serious chunk of dine-in share since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.

Operators are dealing with historically high costs and struggle (even in the best of times) to keep up with labor, food, real estate, franchisee and government-related costs. Food packaging, more than ever, must be a key ingredient in the product development process.

With a recession potentially in the works based on mixed economic data, the foodservice industry must always be two steps ahead of a downturn. Foodservice is one of the leading indicators of a recession. Economists will often cite the decline in away-from-home traffic and sales as the precursor to a recession. The latest figures in August 2022 also showed a drop in consumer confidence, which tends to impact future away-from-home expenditures.

Before moving into operator cost-cutting measures, however, it’s important to caveat the discussion with the fact that today, quality packaging is an important attribute to both consumers and operators. In fact, product quality and availability of the “right” packaging surpass price in terms of selection criteria. Other factors are shown in the table on p. 84.