For J.M. Smucker, the recent volatility in the food and beverage space has underscored the need for manufacturers to have a strong relationship with the retailers who sell their products, a top executive told Food Dive.
Robert Crane, who oversees sales at the maker of Jif, Uncrustables and Smucker jam, said his packaged goods company is collaborating more than ever with retailers following COVID-19, supply disruptions and inflation to make sure their strategies are aligned. The pair also are identifying white spaces that are ripe for product innovation, often with the aid of enhanced data and analytics.
“We’ve been able to build those strong relationships because we bring that perspective of the end consumer and what their needs are, and how we meet those needs as two organizations together,” Crane, who has worked for Smucker for more than two decades, said in an interview.
The 48-year-old executive said his company and retailers are working to ensure the products being carried on store shelves are in demand with consumers and that when a shopper wants to purchase them, they are available.
In an interview, Crane talked about the relationship the packaged food giant has with retailers, how it’s evolving and where it’s going next. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
FOOD DIVE: How has your relationship with retailers changed?
ROBERT CRANE: We’ve built some strong capabilities over time. It’s not been a light-switch situation where all of a sudden we brought these capabilities to bear with our retail partners. There are probably three or four good examples.
One is we’ve really accelerated our joint business planning. And I’m sure you hear that a lot throughout the industry, and really working with our retail partners to ensure that our strategy is aligned with their strategy. The growth drivers are driven through insights and data and bringing longer-term joint business plans supported by those insights and data around all the areas.
Think innovation. So, we’ve done an incredible job through our consumer intelligence insights in bringing those needs of the consumer, in bringing innovation that supports those needs. And so accelerating our joint business planning with our retail partners has been a key unlock for us.
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Permission granted by J.M. Smucker
I can tell you we partner with our retailers very deeply on data and analytics, and we’ve built capability around that within our organization to support deeper insights. One unlock for us as well through the data and insights is we focus on supporting category growth with our retailers.
We obviously want our brands to grow with our retailers, and that’s important, but as we approach our retailers, it starts with the consumer, but then as we ladder down, it’s really focused on category growth for their categories. That is kind of unlocked a partnership in not just focusing on our brands with our insights and analytics but focusing on the total category growth for them as well.
The other thing we’ve done over the last five years is we’ve really enhanced our retail capabilities with our customers. When I say retail, those are the teams that are in the stores, working our products at the shelf, day in and day out. And we’ve really enhanced that capability to be focused on the fundamentals. So really ensuring that our products are on shelf, ensuring that our products are in stock, available to the to the shopper.
We’ve also used advanced analytics to be able to identify at the store level of where there might be opportunities for retailers to ensure that availability to their end consumer and end shopper. That really was highlighted through COVID. With all the supply disruption through COVID, it was really important that we make sure that we’re providing them those insights to where there are opportunities to push product, too, so that that could be available to the shopper.
Are there any product examples that have come from this?
CRANE: Jif Peanut Butter and Chocolate was really driven by a true insight that shoppers in the spreads category were not purchasing what we would call sweet-type spreads to support category growth. And we felt like, there are obviously competitive-type of products in that category, but this is a unique proposition. It has obviously less sugar, which aligns to some of those consumer needs.
What it’s been able to do is actually bring new consumers into the spreads category that weren’t purchasing that category before. And that’s the way we think about innovation and products that we bring forth with our retail partners. We want to grow the category through new consumers in new usage occasions in that category. If you think about peanut butter and chocolate as well, highly used for snacking. It’s ultimately used on other carriers [like celery or apples] and that also can build the basket.
It’s not only about bringing new consumers into the category and keeping them in the category, which [Jif] Peanut Butter and Chocolate has done, but it’s also building the basket for our retail partners, ultimately by bringing other products along with the purchase of our products.
Has your relationship with retailers changed over time?
We have a fully collaborative, trusting, transparent relationship with our partners, and we build that over time. That’s not something that’s happening just now or immediately. I’ve been with Smucker for 21 years, we’ve built that trusting partnership through transparency and collaboration with our retail partners. And then it goes back to having more discussions around the fundamentals, ensuring that we are talking about the right assortment that the consumer is looking for, the right planogram placements, the availability on shelf.
I would say the collaborative nature has been accelerated between retailers and suppliers because there is a lot more discussion on, ultimately, the fundamentals and ensuring that we’re meeting the needs of our consumer through the fundamentals of the business.
What is largely responsible for the increase in collaboration?
CRANE: Data and analytics has brought that to bear. Honestly, that shared collaboration on identifying the right insights that would ultimately lead to growth drivers for the category in the retailer is really where the collaboration has accelerated.
Obviously all retailers have very sophisticated data and analytic models. They actually have more data than we would on their consumer because they have that data within the store and what they see from their shopper. We enhance that with our data analytics that we pull through insights of researching the consumer, in researching their categories. And so I would say the main shift in the collaborative nature has been delivering against insights and data and analytics that ultimately meet the needs of the mutual consumer.
Has your use of data changed?
CRANE: We have more data available to us today than we probably ever had in history. And so it’s just the amount of data, and then the capability of being able to crunch that data as you think about machine learning and that type of technology that we have now, that’s something new, that we’re able to crunch more data. We have more data. We’re able to crunch data faster and get to those insights faster that allow us to support our retail partners in innovation launches faster than we’ve ever been able to do in the past.
Are there any products that have benefited from this influx of data?
CRANE: Cafe Bustelo is a great example, and as you think about the new generation of coffee drinkers, we tend to see them gravitating more towards cold coffee, what we call multi-serve coffee. Traditionally, it has been and is currently in the refrigerated area of the store. And there were limited offerings over there.
We know Bustelo indexes very high with the younger generation, just based on its cultural relevance. And so we’ve developed a multi-serve refrigerated coffee in Bustelo that we’re launching with our customers to ultimately meet that need of the new coffee drinker and that new generation of coffee drinkers. We’ve seen an incredible success with that. It’s actually exceeding both our internal expectations as well as our customers’ expectations, as we think about velocities.
Jif Peanut Butter and Chocolate is another great example of that, of really digging into consumer insights, category insights, getting deep into the models and understanding where the white space might be. And then when we identify that white space through the data, and when we can show the retailer, “Hey, this is an underserved part of the category, and we feel that through what we’re seeing in the analytics, that we could bring households into the category.”
