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As most of you know, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) has enacted new requirements in nutritional labeling for meat and poultry products which take effect March 1. To help you understand the new regulations, refer to the basic overview below. For more information, we’ve posted a power point presentation from the USDA which you may find useful. Additional details can be found on the USDA website.

is prepared to help you comply with the new
regulations. Feel free to call me with any questions or specific needs you may
have.

Mark Mattingly

Director of Sales and Marketing

1.800.882.5104

mmattingly@bollin.com

Let’s talk about how to best service your stores.

Overview of USDA/FSIS new requirements re: nutrition labeling

Effective 3/1/2012

Nutritional information must be readily available on popular cuts of raw meat and poultry products in single-ingredient packages. “Readily available” means information must be on the package label or on point-of-purchase materials within close proximity.

Ground and chopped meat and poultry products, while considered major cuts, are handled differently under the regulations. Nutrition labels are required on all ground or chopped meat and poultry products, with or without seasonings. If the retailer makes a claim of lean percentage on their ground or chopped meat, they must also provide a statement of fat percentage.

Some exemptions to the regulations include:

• Ground meat products by small businesses with fewer
  than 500 employees


• Stores producing less than 100,000 pounds of ground
  meat in each category, such as 90/10 or 85/15, etc.


• Packages of meat containing more than one
  ingredient, such as ground beef mixed with cheese and onions


• Products custom slaughtered or prepared and meat
  that is ground by the butcher as the customer’s request

Note: The new requirements do not
apply to seafood. The seafood category is governed by the FDA.

Power Point/PDF Presentation

During football season and especially the holidays, shoppers are looking for ways to entertain friends and families. As stores ramp up for demand in party trays, we hope you and your customers seize the opportunity by enhancing deli trays with impactful seasonal and promotional labels. At Supermarket Labels, we work to develop new and creative ways to help you do just that.

Take our Big Game day label, for example. Designed to fit in the center of large and small deli trays, this label serves to remind shoppers to stock up for the upcoming football playoffs and bowl games. They’re ideal for Super Bowl sales and again during March Madness. We hope you order these and other promotional labels to take full advantage of such selling opportunities.

Whatever games you’ll be watching, enjoy!

Happy Holidays!

Mark Mattingly

Director of Sales and Marketing

Several supermarket chains are removing self-checkout lanes as their popularity drops. A Food Marketing Institute (FMI) report shows that 16% of customers used self-checkout in 2010, down from 20% in 2006. "Self-checkout lines get clogged as the customers needed to wait for store staff to assist with problems with bar codes, coupons, payment problems and other issues that invariably arise with many transactions," according to Big Y Foods, which tried self-checkout, then decided to remove it. To read the entire article, visit Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (11/27)

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_769065.html

This recent blog by Eric Le Blanc (IndependentGrocerNetwork.com) gives retailers some optimism in lieu of not-so-encouraging forecasts of projected growth for supermarkets. He also shares some tips to promote sales of deli prepared foods, which you may find useful. I highlighted some of his key points. –Mark Mattingly, Director of Sales and Marketing at Bollin Label Systems

By Eric Le Blanc

The Economy and the Future of Deli

This morning my 19 year old son had his wisdom teeth out. I am sitting by his bed and taking advantage of the time to catch up on some of my reading--in this case some reports from the folks over at Kantar Retail.

I was reviewing the Q1 figures for same store growth for supermarkets. First look says that same store growth was 2.6%. That doesn't sound too bad in a rough economy. Here's the bad news, however: inflation accounted for 2.5% of that growth. As I read further, I saw the forecasts for the supermarket channel for Q4 and Q1, and growth is projected to be lower yet. And the latest consumer confidence numbers are atrocious, and according to the folks at Kantar, there is a close relationship between consumer confidence and Consumer Intentions (TM by Kantar Retail).

So what's a deli retailer to do? I wish I were smart enough to say for sure, but here are a few reasons to be optimistic:

First, while lower income shoppers are expected to have the greatest pull back in discretionary spending (which may have an impact on fried chicken sales), rotisserie chicken sales skew to older and somewhat more affluent shoppers, who are expected to be more resilient in discretionary spending. It may be that smart retailers in Q4 and Q1 will spend more time driving awareness of rotisserie chicken and fine-tuning their operations to ensure in-stock position and high product quality.

Some deli prepared food items--most notably rotisserie chicken--are seen by the consumer as a tremendous value. Make that a part of your messaging and product positioning in these key quarters. You don't need to deep discount, but communicate value (potentially vs foodservice) and product quality. But everything indicates that the battle for rotisserie dominance is in awareness and in-store execution. Get that right and you needn't sacrifice your retail price or your margins.

Third, don't be fooled by consumer surveys that say the consumer is going to cook at home more as a way of coping with a struggling economy. You can grow your tomatoes in that. Consumers are NOT going to cook more. They did not cook more when everyone talked about cocooning in the early 2000's and they did not cook more in 2008-2009. Sorry, but it's true. In the last downturn, consumers ate out exactly one time fewer per quarter. While the aggregate effect of that on the foodservice industry is considerable, from an individual consumer perspective, it's hardly a sea change. Consumers will still seek the convenience of NOT cooking, and deli prepared foods is an economical way to NOT cook. Forget about what people SAY they are going to do--look at what they did.

Times will be difficult in coming quarters--make no mistake about it. But fortune favors the brave. The right product targeted to the right consumer still presents wonderful upside potential. And here's the best reason not to worry: in all of the analysis I've done looking at retailers and how well they are developed in various deli prepared foods product categories, I have yet to see any retailer who doesn't clearly have growth opportunities in their marketplace. The key is to drive incidence (The % of your total shoppers who purchase deli prepared foods) and frequency (how often your deli shoppers buy). Even in a tough economy, gains can be made in these two areas.