Plugged In Consumers

View the November 2011 Specialty Food Magazine

You may have noticed Chris Crocker, our Senior Vice President of Media, grinning from this column in our October issue. After my third call from industry friends asking where I’d disappeared to, I thought I should explain: I literally fell out of a tree on Labor Day and didn’t think it wise that I write my October column from a hospital bed under the influence of narcotics. Now I’m healing up and ready for another column!

Luckily I didn’t have to worry about what to write. Sharp-eyed reader Jack Acree of Saffron Road Foods sent me two photographs of charging stations for electric vehicles installed at food retailers. As a car geek of the first order, I viewed this concept with a dose of cynicism. The promise of the infrastructure to support electric cars has always been coming “ten years from now.” But then I noticed the retailers in the photos were Publix Greenwise in Tampa Bay, Fla., and Whole Foods Market in Wellesley, Mass., and it occurred to me that maybe something really is changing.

In the Deloitte report “Gaining Traction: A Customer View of Electric Vehicle Mass Adoption in the U.S. Automotive Market,” early adopters of electric vehicles are characterized as young people with annual household income in excess of $200,000. The next wave of buyers averages $114,000 and lives largely in urban and suburban areas. Does that demographic sound familiar? That’s a near perfect overlap with the prime ages and income levels of the specialty food consumer as described in the NASFT’s 2011 “Today’s Specialty Food Consumer” report. If Deloitte’s report is correct, the specialty food consumption and electric-vehicle adoption “sweet spots” are the same.

One of the key barriers to taking electric cars mainstream has been establishing convenient and widely available recharging facilities. But recently, Sheetz, which operates more than 350 convenience stores in the U.S., announced it would be rolling out charging stations at five of its Pennsylvania locations. Meijer has installed them in Michigan with plans for more in the Midwest, while Fred Meyer will have stations in Oregon and Washington. These companies are on the forefront of addressing this infrastructural need.

Retailers have long seen the value of enticing customers with low fuel prices alongside grocery and convenience foods. The Economics and Statistics Administration blog points out that grocery and club-type stores saw their total automotive fuel sales double to 5.1 percent between 2002 and 2007. The same article speculates that when the 2012 Economic Census is completed, grocery and club stores could “account for a double-digit share of total gasoline sales.”

If concentrating fuel and food shopping has helped lure shoppers to both mass grocery and gas, could electric-vehicle charging stations do the same for specialty and natural stores? It’s early days, but if I were able to recharge a Tesla while grocery shopping, it may just be enough to bring me over to the light side. |SFM|

By Matt Thomas
Publisher, Specialty Food Magazine
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