Source: Sosland Publishing Co.Oh Pretty Woman, Where Did Our Love Go, Dancing in the Street, Baby I Need Your Loving.
The soundtrack to IDDBA ’24 in Houston was pretty sweet. I heard these and other classics before, in between and after sessions.
Turns out they all had something in common. They were all released in 1964, which happens to be the same year IDDBA was founded.
It was a celebratory atmosphere throughout the association’s 60th anniversary party.
The Cake Boss himself, Buddy Valastro, hustled over from the Emmys in Los Angeles (he won) to make sure he got to the show on time, and he didn’t disappoint.
“Supermarket bakers were putting bakers like me out of business,” Valastro told IDDBA attendees, describing the early days of his career. “How many doughnuts did I have to fry to make $1,000? I had to start making things they couldn’t make. So I doubled down on wedding cakes. I could make a three-tier cake for $1,000.”
From there, Valastro went on to talk about how he eventually embraced ISBs, including selling many of his products in them. And he shared some of his crystal-ball prediction for the department.
(Single-slice will be big.)
Heather Prach, IDDBA’s vice president of education and industry relations, shared six trends (6 for 60) the association is focusing on this year, all of which resonated throughout the show:
- Food’s influence on not only body but also mind and spirit.
- Sourcing, sustainability, salary.
- The technology of today and for tomorrow.
- Young, youngish and young at heart.
- Community, convenience and cash flow.
- Culture, cuisine and culinary explosions.
The IDDBA show floor, meanwhile, featured the usual unbelievable array of meats, cheeses, baked goods, prepared foods, salads and untold other varieties of delicious foods.
More than 2,200 exhibitors and 10,000 attendees made sure there was plenty of activity and traffic throughout.
IDDBA proved its industry leadership position once again. Leader of the Pack, you might say.
Big anniversary, big show
“IDDBA 2024 was made possible by the IDDBA member community, IDDBA staff and the many companies the association works with daily to create this phenomenal experience,” said David Haaf, IDDBA’s president and CEO.
“When we originally worked with IDDBA to bring their show to Houston, we knew it was going to be a perfect pairing,” added Houston First Corporation President and CEO Michael Heckman. “This year, we were pleased to welcome the group back for the third time. Hosting the premier industry show for dairy, deli, bakery, and food service in a city known for its expansive and diverse culinary scene just makes sense. Add to that the group’s latest attendance numbers and it’s evident this is a great match.”
Tall task for instore departments
The instore deli and bakery departments of 2024 need to cater to consumer needs for convenience, experimentation and physical and mental health — just to name a few.
Oh, and they need to keep one eye firmly fixed on cost at all times.
A tall task, indeed. A panel of industry experts kicked off IDDBA ’24 June 9 with a discussion of these and other trends in deli, bakery and dairy that bear close watching.
Anne-Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics kicked off the panel discussion by looking at the differences in shopping behavior between younger and older Americans.
“There are massive differences based on low vs. high income, different regions people live in, different ethnicities, but more than everything, the biggest differences are generational.”
Fifty-two percent of baby boomers, for instance, cook mostly from scratch. That number falls to 37% for younger Millennials and Gen Z.
Younger Americans go to the store far less and they’re much more likely to get their recipe inspiration from Tik Tok, You Tube and Instagram than from cookbooks.
“We’ve gone from a written world to a world of pictures and videos,” Roerink said.
Young people are also far more likely to experiment with Korean, Cuban, Japanese and other ethnic foods. Thirty-five percent are up for trying new foods they’ve never had before, compared to 15% of older consumers.
That said, even older consumers are starting to piggy-back on the younger generations when it comes to tapping into the power of social media, said another panelist, Jody Barrick, senior vice president of fresh for UNFI.
Boomers, too, want to discover “the next feta pasta” craze taking over social, Barrick.
Another panelist, Josh Bickford, president of Clyde’s Donuts, said that after companies had to reign in their experimentation and focus on just staying afloat during the pandemic, innovation is back on the table.
“People are desperate for new flavors,” he said.
For Clyde’s, that’s meant new flavors like spiced chai and new, upscale variations on nostalgic favorites, like strawberry pink lemonade — part of the “newstalgia” trend.
Creative promotions
To thrive in today’s environment, It’s also crucial to introduce not just innovative products but innovative promotions, panelists said.
Look beyond the traditional holidays, Bickford recommended. Clyde’s got the idea, for instance, to build a promotion around the Masters golf tournament. The company rolled out a brioche pimento cheese donut, in honor of the Masters’ famous pimento cheese sandwiches.
Barrick agreed. A popular recent outside-the-box promotion for UNFI was a “halfway to St. Patrick’s” promotion on corned beef — a new, and very successful, spin on Christmas in July promotions.
Even with innovation in full creative swing following the pandemic, there are still many challenges the industry faces, and they don’t all have to do with price.
There’s a huge education battle, for instance, that producers and retailers have to fight with consumers over perceptions over products’ healthfulness, which continues to become more and more important.
An alarmingly large number of Americans, for instance, think that cheddar cheese qualified as an “ultra-processed” food, said David Stearle, vice president of sales, US dairy, for Land O’ Lakes, and president of Vermont Creamery.
“I’m glad I’m in sales because our marketing people have a hard job” educating consumers about what’s healthy, Stearle said. “It’s a challenge to communicate where food comes from. I think we wish it would all go away, but it’s not.”
The Cake Boss weighs in on ISBs
Buddy Valastro has had an interesting relationship with supermarket bakeries.
When “The Cake Boss” of TV fame — the day before IDDBA 2024 started, he won an Emmy — started out, taking over the family bakery after his father’s death from lung cancer, ISBs were a formidable foe.
When it came to sheer volume, Valastro couldn’t compete with grocery.
“Supermarket bakers were putting bakers like me out of business,” Valastro told IDDBA attendees. “How many doughnuts did I have to fry to make $1,000? I had to start making things they couldn’t make. So I doubled down on wedding cakes. I could make a three-tier cake for $1,000.”
From the start, Valastro made beautiful wedding cakes. And one day, a wedding magazine editor saw one in his shop window.
The rest is history. Valastro’s cakes became staples of all the wedding magazines. His personality and the personalities of what he called his “crazy, big Italian family” made him a natural for TV.
But at some point, the circle came back around to grocery bakeries. Once again, Valastro has ISBs on his mind. But this time his attitude is a cooperative one.
“I feel like now, I’m not a retail baker anymore. I have bakeries. But I’m an innovator. I want to innovative for the industry.”
Shows like IDDBA “bring us together,” Valastro told the crowd, clearly indicating that he’s now full sail in the same direction as grocery ISBs.
Single-serve renaissance
Valastro has some definite ideas about where his and grocery bakery departments’ ships are headed.
“When I think of retail, I think single-serve is the future.”
The germ of Valastro’s entry into the single-serve business was a meeting with an entrepreneur who had the idea of putting cannoli in a vending machine.
That would never work, Valastro told him. The cream wouldn’t hold up.
But cake slices would work. The result was a vending enterprise in Toronto that went through a tractor-trailer’s worth of cakes in a month.
Later, Valastro was talking to a grocery chain about installing cake vending machines. The grocer was worried that it would compete with the stores’ ISBs.
So Valastro recommended selling the slices in the ISB and skipping the vending machine altogether.
Every Buddy’s Cakes, as Valastro’s MAP-packaged slices for retail are known, are actually three slices in one — one slice of cake with three layers, each a different flavor.
Everything in them is made from scratch, they have no preservatives, and yet they have 30 days of refrigerated shelf life. The line boasts a miniscule 2% shrink rate at retail.
Newest for Valastro are Buddy’s DIY cake kits, which contain all the ingredients to make a 5-inch cake. A QR code on the packaging links to a video where Valastro shows you how to make it.
Cakes in the line include Frankenstein, Santa, a jack-0-lantern, reindeer, elves, cats, dogs and many more.
“Think how many gingerbread cakes you sell,” Valastro told the retailers in his IDDBA audience. “No offense to gingerbread, but these cakes, you can eat.”
Next up for the Cake Boss for retail are a DIY cannoli kit, a tres leches cake and a cookies and milk cake. Expect to see them in stores soon.
ISBs have made huge progress in recent decades, Valastro told the audience, and he’s confident that more big strides are ahead.
“You should be very proud of the past 20 or 30 years. This industry has come a long way from the 90s to today. But how can we push ourselves further?”
Think outside-the-box, experiences and more clean-label, Valastro urged his fellow bakers.
This article is an excerpt from the July 2024 issue of Supermarket Perimeter. You can read the entire IDDBA feature and more in the digital edition here.
