memo

Product

As a food retail store, the most important thing is products. Products’ prices, products’ qualities and products’ selections are the most important thing for a grocery store. Bakery has expanded its catalog since the conversion of Asian style supermarket. On top of the original western selections, many Asian elements have been added to our products. The introduction of the Asian cakes and Asian bread loafs has successfully attract many customers’ interest, but the product selections that the bakery is offering now is less of competitive advantages.

The Trends of Bakery Products

People eat constantly every day, but what people eat is always different. The most important element of bakery products is to fulfilled people’s empty stomach in and quick and cheap way – that was more than 15 years ago. Nowadays, the biggest selling point of bakery products will be their nutrition values, tastes and presentations. The nutrition value of bakery products has become the most important factor.

People want to be healthy, by reaching their goal of being healthy the first thing that they care the most is what they put into their mouth, which mean people want heathy food. The healthy trend in the bakery department is very clear: starting from whole wheat bread and whole grain bread to rye bread and sprouted grain bread to organic bread, and nowadays gluten-free bread. People are eating healthier and healthier. Figures of the Market Indicator Report (July 2011) from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada shows that there is possibility of the gluten-free bakery market to reach 35. (Canada A. a.-F., 2011). As the growth of the gluten-free market, we should expanded our products into gluten-free era. Utilized the space of the bakery freezers as many gluten-free products will kept frozen, this way customers can get the freshest products while they consume the bread and frozen bread also have a longer storage life. Bakery is going to introduce a whole line of gluten-free products including buns, loafs, cakes, desserts and pastries.

While expanding the gluten-free sections of the bakery, locally produced organic and healthy products will be another main section that bakery will focus on. Gluten-free products are very healthy foods, but most of them are frozen and the taste is fairly hard. Locally produced organic bread are fresh made everyday by certified suppliers with daily delivery. Bakery is going to proudly present the image of supporting local business with local organic ingredient.

The trend for western bakery is going toward to the healthy way while the Asian bakery products tends to be more concentrate on tastes and presentations. The Asian products that the bakery is carrying right now are more like a traditional Hong Kong style, but the most popular bakery products are mainly from Taiwan and Japan.

Products Suppliers

In-House Production

Customer Services

Low price can help retail store attract customers, but great customer services is the key point of maintain customers. No matter what position you are standing in the company, you will benefit from great customer service skills (Conlow, Watsabaugh, & Books24x7, 2014). For the owner, good customer service can help them maintain real valued customers, encourage customers to purchase more from the store. For the employees, they will gain confidents and compliment by providing great customer services. And great customer service definitely will be the greatest factor to business’ growth.

The following data outline the benefits of customer service:[footnoteRef:1] [1: PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) data base of the Strategic Planning Institute. (PIMS is a database the researches business strategy effectiveness that publishes data this type of data. You gain access to the data with a subscription.)]

(Conlow, Watsabaugh, & Books24x7, 2014)

“Always customer first” is one of the Overwaitea Food Group’s service statements. Many retail businesses have given up on customer services in order to maximize their profit margin, but our company said “NO” for scarifying the benefit of customers in order to make more money. We always trying to do the best for our customers, to make customers happy, and to establish a community friendly images for the store. The customer service for bakery department is more focus on how to provide the freshest product for our customers, answer all the questions that customers have, and promoting new products.

Training and Trouble Shooting

Many employees in retail store don’t like to do customer services, because this is a very stressful work. There are a lot of questions from customers which employees have no idea how to answer, specially while there is an angry customer came by and started yelling at whoever on his/her ways. Bakery staffs face a lot of this type of customers at the cake service section while they taking cake orders. The best way to prevent this kind of customer service problems is to stop the problem at the beginning.

Troubleshooting is one of the ways to solve those problems. First, the cake specialist will complete and perfect the cake order taking process on top of the original process that we are having right now. The recent process only concentrated on the specialized kids’ cake program, but as our store is half Asian style now, bakery offers lots of other choices for customers. Second, a handout with all the necessary information for what kind of cakes that we can offer for customers to order will be available for customers and employees. Each bakery employees should know the information in that handout and know where to find the information while they encounter cake order problems.

Training of how to take special orders from customers (including cakes and breads), how to handle simple complaints and how to say “NO” to customers while we cannot do what they want. While there is a systematic cake order taking process, it is not hard for employees to handle cake order smoothly. The only thing that everyone need to keep in mind is never say YES for something that we cannot do because this is the source of troubles and complaints. Employees will trained to use proper communications skills to refused customers request and handle small complaints. Our company has given everyone has some sort of authority to handle complaints, and we need to ensure everyone uses these authority at the right way because handling complaints can be very critical. If complaints have not been handle properly, it can destroy the reputation for the whole company. The best result for mishandle complaints will be the customer purchase less from that store, or never come back to shop in the same store any more. The worst situations will be the customer told this unsatisfied shopping experiment to all his/her friends and post the issue on media. So company should carefully handle complaints. With proper training, first –line employees can handle or eliminate small complaint at the beginning; or even they cannot handle the complaint, they won’t cause the problem to become bigger and bigger.

Demonstration of Products

There is a big part of customer services that we have left out because we don’t do it on a regular basis – demonstrating products. With all the new products that we are going to bring into the store, demonstration of products should be brought back to our department on a regular and scheduled basic.

The best way to promote a new items is let customers try the new products out. This works on everything sales in the market. The biggest advantages for bakery items on demonstrations is that a fresh slice of bread or cake is always tastes the best with sweet smell in the air. Many customer will choose not to buy a loaf of bread just simply because of its name, but to make a customer to buy a loaf of bread will be just as simple as offering them a bite.

Demonstration bakery product will hold at the busiest time during the weekend while there is high volume of customers in and out of the store. There will be cross department sales opportunity around the demo table: butter is the soul mate of bread, also jams, cheeses, hams even BBQ meat and vegetables. The demo person is the key for the whole demonstration, he or she has to be able to explain all the special points of the new products and knowing how the customer can get the best taste out of the products. He or she has to keep all the ingredient in mind, be caution about allergies and health and safety problems.

Visual Merchandising

The design of a store can help support the brand image as well as underpin a successful retail strategy (Morgan, 2008). Our store has been through a store wide renovation three years ago right before the conversion. The new line up of products and the design of the whole store focus on customer convenient. With the bright white lighting and unique Price Smart blue bins the whole store looks clean and neat despite the fact that this design is not fitting for bakery.

Fixture Relined

The design for bakery usually tends to give people a warm and comfort feeling, just like a loaf of fresh bread. There was special lighting and shelves for the bakery department before the renovations, but right now everything has blended into the grocery design. Bakery is using the grocery shelves to stock breads, which cannot show the products to the customers. The worst thing is with the straight white light from the ceiling, the bread shelves is almost invisible for most customers. Many customers can only see the products on the tables without notice that the grocery shelves are also have bakery products.

The adjustment of the lighting system’s angle is necessary to improve the presentation of our products on the grocery shelves. Light should go straight toward the products rather than the shelves. The bright white light should change to nature yellow light, and the space between each shelf need to be adjusted to 16 inch so that the customer we see the products on the shelves.

Wooden tables should be used instead of the produce’s tables that we are using right now. Those tables made with paper card board and black hard plastic, they are great for produce products but totally not a good display tools for bakery. Wooden tables can give people a “home” feeling, and also lift up the bakery’s image as a high end store. The regular wooden tables have more capacity than the produce’s bins, once filled up with fresh bread then we don’t need worry about it for half day, which can increased production efficiency.

Products Relined

With all the new products that we are able to introduce into the bakery, a well-design products schematic will need to be completed. We are still keeping all of our fresh in-store made products on the tables of main bakery floor. Those are everyday fresh items with the highest sales volume and profit margin. The two tables at the very front of the bakery will used for biggest promotion items every week, on the right hand side of the bakery, we will reserved a whole section for all the new products that we will bring in.

The cake specialist has already have a basic idea about how to reline the two self-serve cases and the two service cases. For the cake section, bakery is going to concentrate more on the single served delicate items like cake slices, macaroons, fruit tarts and parfait cups.

Budget

The cash budget for this project will be about 7000-8000 dollar, and this money will be used for the lighting systems and the purchase of new wooden tables.

The bakery buyer’s participation is necessary. There are many Asian suppliers available for outsourcing, we would like to go through the proper channel to start the business with them. The estimate process will be about 4 to 6 weeks. Weekly meetings of buyer and bakery management team to discuss detail and process.

Extra labor hours are requested for the implementation of the product relines and training for better customer services.

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