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Fascinating book written by @ruhlman from inside the operations of a local grocery store, learning from its owners going about their business, receiving and merchandising food and contemplating the evolution of the food system and the central role played by the supermarket 
9000 SKUs: “The country’s first grocery stores, in the late 19th early 20th centuries, carried about 200 products. During the final decades of the 20th century the number of SKUs exploded. The avg supermarket had fewer than 9,000 items in 1975. By 2008 that number had quintupled”
Turns out, somewhat obviously, that this explosion in CPG SKUs coincided with cable TV going mainstream (and the corresponding proliferation of TV ad slots) in the early/mid 1980s
An argument in favor of a focused supermarket range: “when faced with an array of complex options [...] we stick to the familiar or go by price because we don’t want to deal with so many choices and scrutinize label claims or nutrition information”
Grown on the back of the first transcontinental railroad started in 1869 as a tea distributor, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co (later A&P) by 1920 was taking in 10c of every $1 Americans spent on food, making it the biggest food retailer and overall retailer in the world
A&P was first to sell a branded product (tea) in 1870 and the first and sell to sell a private label grocery product (baking powder) in the 1880s. They were also giving away promotional items, chromolithographs, which later became trading stamps (aka coupons) traded in for goods.
Aided by the rise of low cost tin can and cardboard box production, by 1920 the A&P owned 16,000 stores, 70 factories and 100+ warehouses. In 1900 it had $5m in sales (and a 2.5% profit margin). Sales in 1925 would exceed $ 350m ($4.8B today) more than any retailer in the world.
“Few economic changes have mattered more to the average family. Thanks to the management techniques A& P brought into widespread use, food shopping, once a heavy burden, became a minor concern for all but the poorest households.” The last A&P store closed in 2015 after 150 years.
Piggly Wiggly (what a name!) was first to introduce self service in Memphis in 1916. It took years for this to catch on, in 1929, Time magazine still marveled at the “almost automatic process” of shopping there in an article called “The Piggly Wiggly Man.”
The first true supermarket was the King Kullen in Queens, NY opened in 1930 in a 3,000 sqft building off the main commercial strip, with plenty of parking, where low rent, high sales volumes and cash only (other stores all sold on credit), kept prices low. where rent was steep.
Car-less grocery shopping: “This was the Depression. Some people didn’t have a car at all. The homemaker had to walk and carry back what she bought or deal with a store that delivered. Dairy products were customarily home delivered. And there were home delivery bakeries”
1960s: As more women began to work outside the home, convenience became the main marketing lever food companies and advertisers used to sell their new products. “Cooking is a chore; let us do the work for you” was the message of Jell-O instant pudding & Betty Crocker cake mix
The 3,000 sqft store became 30,000 on its march through the 1960s and 1970s, toward the huge supermarkets of today, which can measure up to 90,000. Don’t get to the checkout line and realize you forgot the milk, because it’s a hike to the dairy section at the back of the store.
The grocery game remained unchanged through the 1980s. Grocers did business pretty much as they’d been doing since the 1950s because they were the only game in town. Then 2 difft stores made 1988 a watershed year: Walmart entered grocery and Whole Foods launched outside of Texas
The first Walmart Supercenter opened in 1988 in Washington, Missouri, signaled the beginning of the fragmentation of the food retail world. Costco and Sam’s Club also exploded, offering a tenth of what grocery stores did but great savings on nonperishables bought in bulk.
What John Mackey did was sense that people were starting to want to know where their food came from, and that the food’s source mattered to increasing numbers of people who would be willing to pay a premium for that knowledge and that product.
Whole Foods, by creating a market for organic produce, hormone-free meat, and natural shelf-stable products, created a reliable and scalable supply chain for high quality food that traditional grocers could also use, therefore making a lasting contribution to the US food system
The grocer’s P& L: 68 cents for cost of goods, 24 cents for labor, 6.75 cents for operating costs, leaving a little more than a penny in profit. Credit card fees at 1.4 cents are the second-highest expense line item (!!) That fee barely existed 20 years ago.
The layout and scale of the American grocery store reflects our culture’s general attitudes when shopping for food. The very fact that the produce department is often one of the busiest is a promising sign. Of all the departments in the store, produce seems to be the most hopeful
“At what cost convenience? Convenience isn’t free; it involves a trade-off. With the convenience of prepared food I give up the benefits of cooking food in the home to ensure that the family at least gets to eat together or to take advantage of more time to do something else.”
Birdseye was the father of frozen food, the man most responsible for what is now a $ 240 billion global industry. He created an industry by modernizing the process of food preservation and in so doing nationalized and then internationalized food distribution.
Our country was relatively young when refrigeration came along, so perhaps that’s why we don’t have as wide a range of cheeses as in Europe. Swiss farmers in northern Oregon found that their milk spoiled by the time it reached Portland, so, in 1909, they turned it into Cheddar.
“Kraft Mac & Cheese was advertised in 1937 as “a meal for four in 9 minutes for an everyday price of 19 cents.” The marketing of convenience had begun. And thus did this substance become our national cheese. Proud to be an American”
“I think stores are going to get smaller. If Amazon has its way, that stuff in the center of the store will all be delivered to your door. And we’ll go back to the old days, where it’s all specialty stores; everything else will be so commoditized that we won’t be able to compete”
“As Whole Foods proved, the grocery store, perhaps more than any other mechanism of change (the Farm Bill, say, or the restaurant industry, or food activists), has the power to shape how we raise and produce food in America. But only if we, the consumer, ask for it.”
