Week in Review: Retail insights at SEPC Southern Innovations

NASHVILLE, TN – All year, fresh produce sales at retail have seen slight dollar growth and slight volume shrinkage.

A number of external factors are affecting produce at retail in the past year, said Anne-Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics, who presented SEPC’s sixth annual What’s New? 2026 consumer research during an educational session at Southern Innovations on September 10.

It’s a mix of positives and negatives that are forcing retailers and their produce suppliers to make adjustments.

A big factor this year has been economic pressures on consumers, and Roerink said gas prices tend to inversely correlate with fruit volume sales, so the past six months of higher gas prices haven’t been good for sales.

Some good news is that consumers still value fresh produce even if their budgets feel pinched.

The research shows that 36 percent say produce is still one of the best values in the grocery store; 49 percent say produce feels expensive but is still worth it; and 15 percent say it feels like a luxury.

“Produce has become a little bit of a luxury but still worth the splurge,” she said.

The economy shift is also changing retail market share, as over the past 5 years, traditional grocery has fallen from a 51 to 44.7 percent share, while mass/supercenter has grown from 17.1 to 19 percent, club from 11.7 to 14.2 percent, and discount from 10.4 to 10.9 percent.

I talked with Rick Stein, formerly of FMI, who used to present these findings with Roerink, and now runs his own firm, RS Retail Consulting.

He said traditional retailers who are losing market share to lower foot traffic need to increase the basket size of the shoppers they have, “and you can do that with ideation. A well-maintained produce department isn’t enough anymore.”

Stein said retailers need to give consumers more ideas on how to use fresh produce with value-added and whole products.

“Retailers need to think about whole meals and not just the produce department because that’s how consumers think,” he said. “Consumers still don’t know enough about seasonality, for instance.”

Roerink said the Make America Healthy Again movement is showing to be less political than thought, and since it values whole, real foods, retailers should consider tying fresh produce more into that theme.

She also said that as the Silent and Baby Boomer generations’ buying share continues to shrink, promoting to the growing Millennial and Gen Z consumers has to be more digital.

“Gen Z and Millennials are three times more likely than Baby Boomers to use social media to influence their purchases,” Roerink said.

Stein said retailers have a benefit in using digital marketing because it doesn’t require merchandisers to change around the produce department in store as much.

It should be noted that Gen X, in which your columnist resides, was included in the data and has a sizeable share of purchase power. But as we tend to do, our data doesn’t stand out in a significant way.