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Trends: Food Gifting On the Rise

It probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise that people like to eat chocolate. Or that people enjoy food. And everyone likes to receive gifts. Put that all together and it also isn’t surprising that food gifts are increasingly popular across all occasions and food gift types. And that is good news for retailers who sell specialty food products and gift baskets. U.S. consumer…

Stats: Cooking for Generations

What’s for dinner? That depends on whom you ask. According to a generational study published by The NPD Group, the evening meal is the dining event of the day that is most sharply divided by age. Knowing what people want for dinner is a key issue for both retailers and manufacturers trying to figure out what consumers want to buy to cook that meal. Or whether they want to cook…

Retail Profile: The Kitchen Shoppe & Cooking School

Retailer: The Kitchen Shoppe & Cooking School Location: Carlisle, Pa. Founded: 1974 Owners: Sue and Dan Hoffman Square footage: 7,000 sq. feet When Sue Hoffman first opened her store, The Kitchen Shoppe, she focused on selling manual kitchen gadgets. But then engineer Carl Sontheimer introduced an appliance that became known as the Cuisinart food processor. The impact on…

Cast Iron Shows Retail Strength

A staple used by pioneers, cast iron cookware is now being embraced by millennials. Specialty retailers say the 18-to-34-year-old crowd has led to an uptick in sales of the durable cookware, from high-end to basic pieces as millennial customers, who love local artisanship as much as they love value, find the two combined in pans in the style of those their great-grandmothers…

Trends: Eating Where You Shop

More people are eating where they shop these days, especially Millennials, a generation prized by retailers for its size and potential consumerism. Overall, in-store dining and take-out of prepared foods from grocers has grown nearly 30 percent since 2008, accounting for 2.4 billion foodservice visits and $10 billion of consumer spending in 2015, according to a recently…

Stats: Test Your ‘Cue IQ

How well do you know grilling? The Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association has launched an online quiz to test Barbecue IQ. Those who take the quiz learn not only their “IQ,” but also get tips on how to up their barbecue game, as grilling season peaks during the summer. The online quiz can be found at www.hpba.org/Barbecue-IQ . You can prepare for the quiz by checking…

Retail Profile: The Culinary Apple

Retailer: The Culinary Apple Location: Chelan, Wash. Founded: 1996 Owners: David and Mary Weldy Square footage: 1,600 sq. ft. in the retail space; less than 500 in the kitchen space Located in the heart of Washington State’s apple country, The Culinary Apple has taken a leaf from its surroundings with a housewares store stocked with all things apple. There are apple cookie…

Retail Alchemy

Gourmet retailers work hard to find the products their customers never knew they have always wanted. Walking trade show floors, developing relationships with vendors and manufacturer’s reps and going the distance to figure out how to get the best pricing, are part of the mix of a successful sale. But perhaps the most important element of that brew is observing what one’s own…

Stats: Ad blocking in Real Time

Here are some quick facts about the rise in the use of ad-blocking software: At least 419 million people (22% of the workforce’s 1.9 billion smartphone users) are blocking ads on the mobile web. Both mobile web and in-app ads can now be blocked. As of March 2016, an estimated 408 million people are actively using mobile ad-blocking browsers (that means a mobile…