Research: Organic food sales an “illusory trend”
US researchers have suggested that organic products are failing to gain mainstream appeal in the country, despite increasing retail penetration and media attention. According to research firm TABS, there has not been a growth in the number of consumers who purchase organic products over the past 12 months.
“The usage results for our latest study were remarkably similar to the results from last year’s study. Organic food and beauty products continue to be niche products, they have not penetrated a mass audience, to date,” TABS group president Dr Kurt Jetta said.
“Identical to last year, only 38% of adults claim to have purchased anything from the major organic categories in the last six months.”
According to the study, organic fresh fruit had the highest purchase incidence at 26%, with organic fresh vegetables close behind at 25%. Organic dairy products, eggs and milk, were cited for purchase by 17% and 16% of US adults, respectively. Frozen organic products had low purchase levels at 5-7%.
The study found that traditional supermarkets were the preferred outlets for these products compared to natural food stores by a margin of 39% to 27%.
According to Jetta, retailers who are investing heavily in organic products are seeing a “very low return” on their investment.
“We can only hope that the mainstream retailers and manufacturers stop marching in lockstep to this illusory ‘trend’ and refocus their efforts on more mainstream categories and products,” he said.
just-food is the world’s leading portal for the global pre-packaged food and retail industries. Its daily mix of breaking news, views, analysis and research serves over 100,000 food executives each month. http://www.just-food.com/
Bravo! We have been hearing about increasing organic trends for 20 year, growing exponentially. In the USA organic produce ia 2% of the volume and 3% of the dollars, TOPS! Retailers following overblown signals from activists consumers have given the organic items a pass, giving them much more space, promotional support and longevity than organics merit. Let’s recognize that organic is a niche and not a trend..
Well organic sales are on the increase in Australia and the UK.
Market research is notoriously unreliable as politicians will only so gleefully tell you, (yet they still subscribe to its services around election time)
I know because I work in the industry. Sampling, framing of questions, interviewer bias- all can sway the outcome of any survey. What was the sample size? What was the demographic? What was the geographic distribution? Over how long a period was the research carried out? You’d have to be from a major food corporate or supermarket retailing group J Pandol, surely, to be rubbing your hands with such gusto. Organic farmers are doing very nicely here thank you and more and more are converting as they are disillusioned with the corporatisation of our food supply. 45000 Australian “conventional” farmers have left the land over the past 20 years as the supermarket duopoly has grown to 80% of market share and driven down selling prices at the farm gate. Look at the food miles that are clocked up in the conventional farming model so that people can have off-season products on their tables no matter where it is produced so long as it is intensively farmed at the lowest possible cost and the soil is over-monocultured to the point of unsustainability.
Wake up people! Organics is here to stay and it’s our future.