Planning Ahead Is Key for Launching Seasonal Items
With the amazingly warm summer we’ve been having it’s hard to think ahead to the fall and winter holiday season. But people like Jamie Willison, Key Account Manager for Schreiber Foods, have been thinking about the holidays for months! Schreiber, like many private label manufacturers, offers seasonal items that celebrate the flavors of the holidays. For Jamie, seasonal planning begins right after the New Year to ensure inventories for the fall.
Planning for holiday seasonal items begins as early as March with demand planning explains Jamie. It’s the key time for gaining customer commitments to plan line time, and ingredient and packaging needs. This year, planning has been more taxing with supply side challenges. “The flexibility in planning isn’t there this year,” states Jamie. “Packaging lead times are longer, the carrier network is strained . . . everything is behind.” With a perishable product like cream cheese, a matter of two to three weeks of difference in lead time can mean all the difference in time on the shelf and net product loss.
Aside from production planning, offering seasonal items means staying highly informed on flavor and consumer trends. Schreiber has their own market insights team that sends out trend reports. They also rely on information from their plants in Europe, India, South America and Mexico. “We can use our global footprint to borrow product ideas and play off of each other,” Jamie says. “I am constantly reviewing product assortments to put my customers in the best position with consumers.” For companies without their own consumer insights department key trend information can be gleaned by watching social media ads and reading key industry publications.
Product versatility is also an advantage when it comes to presenting limited time offers to retail accounts. For Schreiber, a product like cream cheese lends itself to many uses from a bagel topping to a baking ingredient. They can more easily adapt this product to flavor trends whether it be sweet berry flavors or savory like the currently popular everything bagel flavor. Aside from flavor innovation, Schreiber can offer this item in varying sizes such as pumpkin cream cheese cups to celebrate the fall holidays.
When offering seasonal items to retail partners, Jamie offers that “the biggest and best thing in your arsenal is your buyer relationships.” She continues, “getting face time especially now with the new normal work environment isn’t easy. A strong relationship is going to get you the time.” To establish a relationship in offering a private brand item, it helps immensely to have an established relationship on another item or program. If it’s your first product offering, working with a broker who is well respected with the retailer is an attractive option. Know that it may take time before the first sell-in happens. Jamie shares that with one key account “I went out and met with them as soon as I started, and took them about four years before becoming a Private Brand customer of Schreiber’s.”
Another piece of advice from Jamie is to make sure that you are managing the sell in. It’s important to manage the details from preparation on the front end with getting commitments and sharing price points to follow through in making sure orders are getting placed, orders are shipping as closely as possible to production time and product is getting on shelf in a short time. In the end, you have a limited time to get the sell-through on a seasonal product, generally 8-12 weeks.
While the change over to seasonal items seems to happen overnight on supermarket shelves, that change happens due to diligent planning and management from our manufacturers. As you savor your pumpkin flavored cream cheese, cookie dough, coffee creamer or tea this holiday season, remember that people like Jamie have been thinking of your holiday splurge since March!