Space Invaders

One of the things I find interesting about going to the grocery store is looking around the produce section and seeing what products wind up either up front or shoved to the back, as well as how much space each individual product is allotted. It's actually a very competitive part of the marketing game. Steve Lutz, VP of Marketing for Columbia Marketing International discusses the retail space.

LUTZ: It's really reflective of a lot of different things, a lot of different trends you see in the marketplace. It's reflective of production, it's reflective of consumer demand, it's reflective of marketing, it's often reflective of category profits and so I sort of bundle all that together and say that we can use space as sort of a moniker for a lot of different trends that we see in the marketplace.

Lutz talks about how production and consumption work together.

LUTZ: The popular argument which is largely true is that people consume apples relative to production. It's pretty obvious, right? If we don't grow it, you can't eat it. And that's generally true. I did a correlation analysis looking at the 80's, 90's and the 2000's and what I found was in the 80's to the 90's production and consumption were very tightly correlated. We get into that period in the 90's and in fact it didn't matter what we grew consumption didn't go up.

He says that it came back together in the 2000's. Another big issue is variety.

LUTZ: It's up for everyone. It's not just the beer guys and the apple guys that have suddenly discovered variety. It doesn't matter whether it's apples, citrus, grapes, tomatoes, melons; everyone of those is pushing more products into the supermarket.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.