While many factors influence the shrink percentage within your company or stores a significant impact can often be discovered your process for ordering.  Let's explore a few common challenges that can be undermining the gross profit of your fresh produce department.

Produce Ordering Pitfalls

• Ordering on the Fly:  Winging your order from your desk rather than walking the floor and coolers is a perfect way to inflate in-store inventories.  Increasing the time items fruits and vegetables remain in storage before sale typically decreases overall freshness by the time items reach display promoting incremental shrink.
• Ordering without Specifications:  Ordering random sizes and intermittent quality levels of specific produce items can create displays where customers pick over items to choose the freshest, largest, or best looking items bypassing the items you might need to sell first to maintain freshness and move product through your inventory.   This act can leave remaining items on display to deteriorate generating shrink.  
• Ordering from Questionable or Inconsistent Distributors or Shippers:  Don't order shrink!  While no one would intentionally order bad product, there's many suppliers selling items quickly ready to become shrink.  Working with intentional, quality, best-in-class suppliers will help you minimize loss.  Receiving top notch fresh produce gives you extra days to sell it while influencing a more successful and flavorful at-home eating experience to keep customers coming back.  The more questionable freshness the less likely customers will buy.  Undermined trust and resulting foot traffic drops in your stores will instantly make shrink management even more difficult! 
• Inexperienced Ordering:  Don't allow inexperienced team members write your order.  Remember that your purchase represents thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and requires the upmost attention and care.  Rather, ensure on-the-job training and coaching walks new orderers through the process and quickly addresses "hiccups" should a poor call be made.  There's always room for minor mistakes, but ensure your team learns from them.
• Ordering Mistakes: Remember the time a random box of something you don't usually sell arrived at your back receiving dock?  A simple mispunch or a wrong number and you might have a case of obscure tropical fruit on your hands.  Slow down and ensure accuracy and you'll likely drop dollars to your market's bottom line.

Remember many aspects of fresh produce shrink are controllable or influencable by committment to many wise but simple day to day practices.  Implement these tips into your ordering process and do your part to manage shrink.  A few percentage points of improvement can result in substantial impact on your gross profit!

Note from Merchandise Food:  We've learned a lot from our friends at Zingerman's and ZingTrain over the years, and are thankful for this guest post to share a little more about their the books, work, and business beliefs that have fueled Zingerman's iconic reputation in the food business.  Check it out:

A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to The Power of Beliefs in Business
by Ari Weinzweig

​For as much as I’ve studied, taught, and written about both business and self-management over the years, up until recently I’d hardly paid a coffee cup’s worth of attention to the ways in which beliefs were impacting my world. In the course of Parts 1, 2, and 3of the books that make up the Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading series, I’ve covered mission, vision, values, culture, Servant Leadership, self-management, creativity, anarchism, and a whole lot more. At ZingTrain our training business, we teach 9 different two day seminars on leadership and organizational development.  And yet it’s only in the last few years that beliefs are finally getting their just due.

It turns out that I’d “discovered” a major player in the drama and dreams that make up my life, both personally and professionally. It was as if I’d been focusing on the play itself, the lines of the script, and the way actors sounded from the stage, but altogether ignoring the playwright who wrote the words and set the stage—literally and figuratively—for them to all be there doing what they do. What changed when I began to dial into the details and depths of what I believe, and to look into what others around me believed as well. It blew my mind. And it’s already having a big impact on our organization.

Although they don’t have their own line on the balance sheet, beliefs abound in the business world. But since few of us actually acknowledge them for what they are, or understand their import, they’re essentially invisible. Beliefs, though, are where almost every action, conscious and unconscious, begins. Whether we know it or not, our beliefs create—for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer—the complex reality in which we struggle to succeed every day.
When I talk about beliefs here I’m not referring to religion, sports or politics.  While they’re commonly discussed beliefs, I’m interested for these purposes in less frequently talked about issues.  I’m exploring what we believe about ourselves, about our products, about people in general and our coworkers in particular.  What we believe about the marketplace, about competition, about organizational culture. And if you want to—as I have—carry this work into your personal life, then looking also at what we believe about our lives, our significant others, our kids, what success means, etc.  Suffice it to say that literally everything about our organizations—and our lives—is based, I’ve now realized, on what we believe. As psychologist William James wrote: “Belief creates the actual fact.” 

Here are two learnings that are at the core of this entire book:
a) In the course of researching for the book, I started to see beliefs in three broad categories.  Negative beliefs, neutral beliefs and positive beliefs. Negative beliefs create negative outcomes.  Neutral beliefs don’t do a whole lot.  Positive beliefs create positive outcomes.  You simply can’t get positive outcomes out of negative beliefs.  You can generate a lot of short term energy out of negative beliefs.  But in the long run the energy that emerges from negative beliefs will either just flame out and die, or keep us trapped in back and forth, no-win, cycles of pain and emotional violence. A great healthy sustainable organization, I started to realize, can only be built on positive beliefs.
 
b) We can change our beliefs!! That’s right, we can choose what we believe!  Once we know we have beliefs, become mindful of what they are and understand how much impact they’re having on our lives, we may likely realize—as I did on my many subjects—that what we believe is creating a lot of the reality that we often don’t like.  And that the most effective way to change our daily reality is to not to try to get others around us to change, but to look inward, to change what we believe.  About ourselves, about the people we’re frustrated with, about the world. 
 
Two other subjects covered in the book are also big contributors to organizational culture, health, engagement, and effectiveness.  Hope and the spirit of generosity.  Each is essential to building a healthy, caring, sustainable organization. And, of course, because we’re a food business, the book also includes a dozen or so recipes to use in your kitchen.  A Tunisian couscous with octopus and harissa.  Our challah bread from the Bakehouse.  Chocolate-dipped-espresso cookies from the Bakehouse, and more!
 
Our beliefs, and their impact on our organizations, have not historically won big headlines.  But in the six months or so that The Power of Beliefs in Business has been out it’s already having a huge impact on our own organization and on others who have been to our ZingTrain seminars or read the book themselves.  Just this morning I got an email from a business leader on the East Coast who wrote: “I’m reading through Part 4 and I can’t tell you how it’s helped me focus and be a better leader as we are growing (which is not easy as you know).  But being able to manage my actions/reactions has proven so beneficial for our team (and for me) whom all I know are working just as hard as I am!”       

Learn more at www.zingtrain.com or www.zingermans.com

Use this process to get started and point your project in the right direction.  Read through our upcoming posts to learn 4 steps to build a grab & go market vision.  These steps will help you more clearly communicate your service & operations plan, merchandising approach, equipment needs.  While much more ​work is to be done.

The next time you visit Denver check out the foodie experience and merchandising seen at a nicely curated mix of food concepts at Union Station. Check out ACME for beautifully presented sandwiches which nicely visually highlight their fresh ingredients. Attention to detail abounds in this little outlet packing a great visual food experience. Menu items are well signed and labeled aiding the guests' shopping experience.

A nice little sandwhich or bagel dressing bar adds a fun element and interactive experience to customize menu items to order.

The Acme Pizza Concept is beautifully laid out and features good looking fresh examples of pizza menu offerings accompanied by grab and go formatted salads, sides, beverages and packaged snacks. This unique little food kiosk packs a lot of punch and high quality food merchandising with their freshly prepared made to order foods! Great job ACME and our food business success wishes!