"You're Rushing Through": What Produce Buyers Miss on a One-Day Store Visit

"You have a tendency of rushing through, and you may not capture what you're trying to assess in the marketplace."

That's how Ray Wick describes the old model of flying to a market, renting a car, and hitting as many stores as possible in a day. Ray is founder of RSW Marketing and a produce industry consultant who has worked every layer of the fresh supply chain, from grower to wholesaler to retail buyer, over three decades. He's also one of Storesight's most active users, uploading store photos from visits across the US and abroad.

Chris Payton Barbara from Storesight recently sat down with produce industry veteran Ray Wowryk to discuss how real-time shelf data is changing the way produce brands understand retail performance and build trust with buyers and growers.

Produce departments have grown 15x since the 90s, with none of the marketing budget center-store brands get.

Ray started in the industry in the mid-90s, when a produce department hitting 300 items was cause for celebration. Today that number runs anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 items depending on the retailer. "In the perishable lane of fresh produce, our pockets in respect to marketing dollars aren't as readily available as they are in the center store aisles with the big CPG companies," Ray said. That gap makes shelf visibility one of the few differentiators produce brands can control.

Store visits got more expensive as chains consolidated, and they were never really real-time to begin with.

Mergers and nationalization mean most buyers and marketers now service markets far from home base, and the cost of visiting those markets has climbed. A rushed day of hitting as many stores as possible also only shows one retailer at a time. Skip a competitor's store and you miss the other half of the picture, since your partner's competitors are your competitors too.

Real-time visibility explains what the data can't.

Most retail data reflects the previous 4, 12, or 24 weeks. Ray treats that data as an indicator that something needs a closer look, and treats visual shelf data as the thing that confirms what's actually happening. "If you're over-skewed, it'll show on your digital. If your shelves are empty, it's going to show on your visual." When sales on one item drop while a related item rises, a current photo can show the merchandising change behind the shift before anyone has to guess.

A single photo can open a door with a buyer who isn't even a customer yet.

Ray described spotting a tomato bar merchandising display and sending the photo straight to the category manager with a note. It wasn't a customer relationship yet, but the photo showed he was paying attention to that retailer's business over time. "It shows that I have interest and I'm continuing to learn and monitor their business, so that when that opportunity comes, he's going to know that I know enough of that business that maybe I could be trusted enough to be given an opportunity." He does the same with growers, sending field photos so they can see how their product performs at the retail end of a chain they rarely see in person.

Adoption fails when it stays inside one department.

Ray is one of Storesight's most active users, but he's had a harder time getting his own team to upload consistently. His read: platform adoption needs vertical buy-in from leadership across every department that touches the product, not just marketing. "Everybody plays a key part in the perishable environment," he said, pointing to packaging, quality control, and supply chain as departments that all need ownership when something shows up out of line in a photo.

The bottom line.

Ray's advice to anyone whose team isn't fully using the data available to them: share something from every store visit, good or bad, and use it to start a conversation. Produce is a category built on trust, between brand and buyer, between grower and retailer, and that trust gets built by showing up with real, current information instead of a snapshot from a few months back.

Storesight exists to give produce and fresh brands exactly that kind of real-time, always-on visibility into what's happening at shelf, without waiting on the next store visit or the next data cycle.