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Win with deli category management: optimize longstanding category management practices and overcome data challenges to gather "low-hanging fruit" in retail service deli departments.

Article Excerpt
The service deli department and its core products--meat and poultry--will become a major retail profit center as consumer-focused category management practices become more prevalent. Storewide, the best category management results--sales/profit improvement, supply chain, and cost efficiency improvement--come from perishables departments, including the service dell.

"When category management is applied, there is more low-hanging fruit in departments such as the service deli than in the more traditional grocery areas," says Brian F. Harris, Ph.D., founder and co-chairman of the Cincinnati-based category management consultancy The Partnering Group. "In areas like service deli, a little bit of consumer knowledge goes further in finding opportunities to get better results than it does in grocery departments."

Harris developed the principles of category management more than two decades ago, and defines it as a business process in which retailers and suppliers collaborate to manage categories as strategic business units. In effect, the process shifts a product-focused slotting process to a consumer-centered strategic business plan. Category management finds opportunities to add value for the consumer, and also to increase sales and profits, Harris says.

Category management is relatively underdeveloped in the service deli department, but major retailers are increasingly applying the practice. Carteret, N.J.-based Pathmark Stores Inc. initiated its deli category management program seven years ago, says Charlie Cruger,...

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