MNB reported yesterday that Fresh Direct, the New York-based online grocery service that specializes in fresh foods, has launched “FreshDirect One-Click Recipes, allowing customers to choose from top recipes, buy the freshest ingredients, and receive their delivery without ever leaving home.” Partnering with Workman Publishing, Fresh Direct offers 400 recipes from 53 well-known cookbooks, and “allows customers to search and sort using criteria such as main ingredient, level of difficulty, theme, number served, type of cuisine, cooking method, and more. When a recipe has been selected, the ingredient list easily becomes a virtual shopping list.”

To which MNB user Glen Terbeek responded:

Fresh DIrect's One-Click Recipes is a great example of moving back to the logical shopping experience, built around meal planning, not logistics.

In the old "pre-self service" stores, the housewife would go to the store (often daily) thinking about what she might prepare for dinner that night. The clerk would collect the ingredients for her, and maybe suggest alternatives. She thought meal; he did logistics.

When the self service store became popular because of its lower prices (since the shopper now provides the logistics labor), the stores had to be organized into categories (better called picking slots), so the shopper could find the ingredients for her meal. A good shopper would plan her meals, and then re-sort the ingredient list according to the "slot" locations in the store for "easy" picking. Now the shopper has to think meals, and think (do) logistics as well. The early stores were only 15,000 square feet so this wasn't too bad, and worth the savings. After all, food was a major portion of the family weekly expenditures then.

However, today the current stores are 4 times larger, have 5 times more products, have 1000's times more deals at any one time, while the shoppers have much less time to shop or think about meal preparation. And food is not as an important part of the family budget as it was. Let's face it, supermarkets are not meal logical and not even good for logistics either.

The Internet has the potential of moving back to the corner store shopping experience, making it "meal logical" and removing most of the shoppers' logistics activities. The same items can be presented in many different ways, since their physical location isn't important to the shopper. Coupled with a "moment of value" real store, it can be the perfect shopping experience continuum, maybe like what Tesco Express might become. The manufacturers would find this very interesting. And there are many false economics in today's business model to make it work.

Isn't it interesting that new ideas come from outside the industry? It's time to rethink the current business model.




We referenced a story in the Wall Street Journal the other day about companies bringing out new, pre-packaged ice cubes made from bottled spring water. We mentioned one of the companies involved in this new category, and, to be honest, made a little fun of the whole venture.

This captured the attention of MNB user Mike Schall, president/CEO of aquaICE. And while we normally don’t run these sorts of self-promotional emails (reserving the self-promotion allowed on MNB to ourselves!), we thought it fair to do so now because a) we didn’t mention his company, and b) because we sort of disparaged the whole enterprise.

Schall wrote:

aquaICE was the other brand featured in the Wall Street Journal article that you failed to mention. It has been a nine year journey to the marketplace, including our efforts in securing a United States patent for the product--granted back in 2000.

Our focus is to offer consumers of bottled water and other beverages ice “as pure as the beverage they’re drinking”. According to our consumer research, most people currently purchase bagged ice for cooling and not for “consumption”, so we think there’s a great opportunity to market aquaICE as well as Lemon Essence and Lime Essence aquaICE for those who want a squeeze of lemon or lime in their water. And even households with automatic ice makers in refrigerators responded with very high purchase intent as a result of home use tests. Flavor contamination and off notes, among other things with tap water ice, are real issues for consumers.

The packaged ice business is roughly $2B at retail in the U.S. Bottled water is $10B and climbing. If aquaICE is successful in capturing 10% of the packaged ice business, that’s a $200M niche we’re excited to have. And as for interest at the retail level, when was the last time you saw a really new item on the bottled water shelf—a true incremental purchase. We think aquaICE is just the tip of the iceberg!

Good luck to you.




We had a story the other day about a study from SuperTarget suggesting that American adults put a premium on the family dinner, and in fact say they have dinner together a lot more often that we think they do.

One MNB user wrote:

I agree with your assessment that the study was probably conducted in a manner that caught wishes and aspirations rather than reality. Target would have been better off spending the same amount of money on the study and changed the methodology to a shadow format where they hung out with the PGS and meal maker from 4-7 five days to get a real picture. With two teenaged daughters and a working spouse, we would LIKE to eat together more often, but it only happens a couple of times a week at best, not including meals away from home (i.e. two or three of us go to CPK, La Madeline, or Café Express, or grab the rotisserie chicken dinner at Tom Thumb).

MNB user Carol Edinger wrote:

Missing: One pair of rose colored glasses I lost somewhere in reality. This sounds more like a project to gather data to support an opinion than a study to discover what's happening at mealtime in America's homes. Perhaps the sample in the study was made up of families interviewed while they were shopping at SuperTarget stores...families with kids in tow and carts full of obvious to-be-cooked meal components. Come to think of it, to get the results reported, the people targeted to survey must also have been heard talking about going home to cook together and then sit down to dinner together. There is plenty of data to support that Americans are increasingly aware of the health risks of high fat diets and lack of exercise. There are studies that claim Americans are exercising more. Yet, childhood obesity and diabetes continue to skyrocket and deaths tied to diet and exercise continue to escalate. The study reported here should remind us that we must be sure of the credibility and reliability of a study before we believe the results. Just because it appears in print does not make it so.

And another MNB user wrote:

People will tell you exactly what you want to hear. As I read this article I chuckled thinking that there is absolutely no way these numbers are correct. The primary consumer at Target is the same consumer that is keeping our restaurants in business. I don't know one person shopping at Target that eats dinner as a family unit (at home) more than 2 times/week. I would love to know how they collected their information and how they honestly believed it to reflect what is going on in America at the dinner table.




finally, we got a number of emails concerning our “Snakes In A Discount store” piece, which said that a Wal-Mart customer in Florida got bitten by a snake when he was shopping in the store’s garden center. We noted that the snake was not identified by species but was killed, that the shopper was okay, and joked that it would soon be a movie starring Samuel L. Jackson.

The emails we received noted that subsequent press reports identified the snake as a rattlesnake.

Which suggests to us that maybe Wal-Mart needs to start installing those in-store health clinics down in Florida…and make anti-venom treatments part of the offering.