Cleanup in aisle 3: Consumers lead paradigm shift in groceries

Fads come and go. But some changes and evolutions are destined to be with us either permanently or for a very long time.

To draw from a philosophy of scientific revolution hypothesized in the 1960s by Thomas Kuhn, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the way our food supply system works. That includes a fundamental change to what food products make it onto the valuable real estate that are grocery store shelves.

Inverting the system

Earlier this year, Sylvain Charlebois, a professor at the University of Guelph's Food Institute, gave the keynote address to 140 people at "From Local Fields to Local Plates in Wellington and Waterloo," a food symposium held in Guelph. His presentation was on "The Business Case for Local Food: From the Margins to the Mainstream."

In listening to Charlebois' talk, the idea of margin and mainstream and food system above it, it seems to me is starting to be inverted, at least conceptually if not literally.

For the most part, it used to be that food companies and manufacturers, in concert with massive national grocery stores, had an almost monopolistic exclusive poweras to what products found their way on to lucrative store shelves and were offered to consumers.

Now, however, food consumers are starting to clamber to the top,calling down for what they want to see stocked in thestores.

Given the recent French's-versus-Heinz ketchup kerfuffle, Charlebois's comments are timely. The 2014 closure of the Heinz plant in Leamington, Ont., put factory employees and tomato farmers out of work and caused a social media uproar.

Within days, competitor French's was in the ketchup market in a big way. And with the Twitter hashtag #FrenchsKetchup trending, a major grocery store chainwhich had de-listed the product was, rightly or wrongly, under fire.

• Canadian ketchup? French's not only choice

A similar uprising took place just last week around Billy Bee and the honey they source outside of Canada: a petition started by a Manitoba beekeeper gathered 70,000 consumer signatures and demanded that parent company McCormick use Canadian honey.

Consumer is 'new CEO'

This is not to say that the popular backlash was necessarily fair and accurate: Loblaws, logically, was trying to promote its President's Choice brand, which uses both Canadian grown tomatoes and Canadian processing facilities. Billy Bee honey, according to their website, comes from alfalfa honey sourced "extensively throughout Canada" and fireweed honey from "the northern and Pacific states and Canada."

The perception is the reality, however, especially with social media. It's one reason Charlebois in his keynote address used the term a "new CEO" in the grocery store and stated the impact that is having on the way food is produced and purchased.

"The old-style paradigm was about growing things and pushing whatever we were producing to the consumer, but that trend has been reversed because of social media," he told me after his keynote address.

"More and more, consumers are really telling us what they're looking for and so that means that you're actually looking at reversing the supply management scheme into a demand chain-management scheme, which is really about understanding the consumer first before doing anything up the food chain. It changes the way you see food systems in general."

Fragmentation makes betterbusiness

That, of course, changes everything (or at least a lot) and for the better too. If consumers can easily make demands and do so collectively and with a critical mass, then the way food is grown, processed and distributed is potentially subject to rapid and dramatic change.

It seems to me, then, that the concept and fundamentals of a unified, centralized food system is chucked out like so many tomatoes that are piled over the top of their transport-trailer and roll along the Highway 401shoulder near Leamington in August.

"Fragmentation from an economic viewpoint is a good thing because you can create wealth by recognizing these different segments you can cater too, and you can actually offer different kinds of products," Charlebois said. The reality of this paradigm shift that sees consumers' voices heard more clearly is challenging for food producers and distributors at the same time that it is a potential economic boon for new business.

"Overall we need opportunities to grow food businesses in this county, this province, this country. Market fragmentation would allow for more innovative products to hit the marketplace."