Honeybear Brands, a grower, marketer and developer of premium conventional and organic apples, pears and cherries, says its Honeybear Insights Team (H.I.T.) helps retailers optimize assortment, pricing and promotions with its category intelligence.
Chuck Sinks, president of sales and marketing at Honeybear Brands, says this data helps get new varieties into retailers as well as helps retailers plan for more space for other established varieties.
“We don’t skew it towards Honeybear,” he says. “If there’s a variety out there that we don’t grow that really sells well, we’ll tell them that. We’re not biased in how we run our numbers.”
As part of the data, the Honeybear Insights Team evaluates category performance, shopper behavior and pricing strategies to better help retailers be positioned to meet consumer demand.
As an example, Sinks says a meeting with an East Coast retailer highlighted the retailer’s need to move more New York apples. Sinks says the data helped the retailer increase shelf space for New York varieties and cut back on some Washington varieties to help give those New-York-grown apples a spotlight through the season.
Sinks says this helps build trust with these retailers.
“They know that if we’re making recommendations that won’t really help our business, they know they can trust us when we’re telling them things that will help our business,” he says.
Sinks also says this data and insights go beyond apples and pears.
“With the subscriptions that we have and the data we have, we’re able to look at a lot of different categories,” he says. “It’s not just apples and pears. We can look at a lot of different categories and with that, we can make all sorts of recommendations.”
Sinks says these insights are extremely valuable for time-pressed produce managers.
“We’re here to be a full business partner,” he says. “In the category, sometimes some of these retailers don’t really have access to it or don’t study the numbers and go from history and when that history has changed over the years, it can impact their sales.”
