Inflation-weary consumers around the world are filling their shopping carts with more affordable essentials, including private labels. As the cost of living keeps climbing, more shoppers are switching to grocery private labels this year, especially since March 2022, as the war in Ukraine compounded inflation concerns.
During the first five months of the year, private label dollar sales rose 7.8% compared to 5.0% for national brands of consumer packaged goods (CPG). Year-over-year growth in private label sales as of Q2 2022 were most pronounced in Latin America (up 27.4%) and Eastern Europe (18.1%), showing the vitality of private brands around the world. In 2021, Spain and Portugal, private label share rose 1.3% and 0.7%, respectively, driven by perishable foods, and in Eastern Europe, private label share growth rose in Czech Republic and Hungary (up 2.1% and 0.6%, respectively). Now growth is accelerating across markets.
As demand for private labels soars, and grocery simultaneously gets more costly and competitive, grocers realize their old tools no longer suffice. More grocers are turning to product lifecycle management (PLM) systems – including Trace One PLM – to manage their private label strategies. By unifying product processes, personnel and data, Trace One PLM offers a user-friendly, integrated framework to share information throughout the product lifecycle.
Built for grocery private label success
Here are five reasons why global grocery retailers are using Trace One PLM to improve their private label practices and performance.
1. Efficient collaboration
Grocers are juggling multiple priorities, and coordinating people across their company and their trading partners’ organizations. They use Trace One PLM to simplify and streamline their private label processes by using a centralized source for all their product information to save time and effort, and reduce costs. Connecting all private label team members to a single communications hub allows grocery retailers develop private label products faster. For instance, Trace One PLM improves grocery efficiency, as it has helped retailers to:
- Speed up the specification development process by 50%-60%
- Reduce time to market by up to 3 months
- Improve efficiency during crisis management by 95%
Trace One PLM helps these teams boost productivity and speed-to-market so they can capitalize on growing demand for private brands.
2. Grocery expertise
With more than 20 years of experience in serving grocery retailers, Trace One deeply understands the needs of both grocers, and food and beverage manufacturers. Trace One intentionally hires people who have extensive industry experience from working directly for grocery retailers and manufacturers. By incorporating the real-world knowledge of these subject matter experts, Trace One PLM accurately reflects industry requirements and best practices that protect product quality, food safety and stewardship efforts for grocery trading partners.
3. Private label focus
Unlike other vendors, Trace One is highly specialized in helping grocery retailers with the development of private labels to help them drive sales and loyalty with in-demand, exclusive products. Since companies must follow specific processes when developing private labels compared to other CPG goods, this specialized knowledge is very useful and important to grocers. Using Trace One PLM helps grocery retailers free up time to focus on innovation and differentiation to make their private labels align with consumers’ evolving needs and stand out.
4. Sustainability leadership
More consumers now shop according to their values, including sustainability, and product packaging increasingly influences shoppers’ purchase decisions. Now companies invest more in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives, including sustainable packaging. Especially in Europe and North America, grocery retailers are replacing plastic with recyclable materials across their private label lines. To help retailers align with consumer demand for sustainability, Trace One PLM helps grocers collect all data related to packaging to identify opportunities to improve or change materials for their private brands.
5. Proactive compliance
Food legislation continues to evolve worldwide and these ongoing changes increase complexity for grocery retailers, especially if they operate in international markets. In response, Trace One works with industry experts to help grocers remain in compliance with regulations like food safety legislation and nutritional information labelling. Using Trace One PLM allows grocers to stay informed of regulatory changes and implement new rules ahead of industry deadlines to protect consumer safety and minimize risk.
As private labels grow in popularity around the world, grocery retailers seek new ways to gain a competitive edge. Trace One is a strategic partner with many of the world’s most demanding retailers who gain a significant competitive advantage by using its established food and grocery solutions, including Trace One Product Lifecycle Management software. With over 20 years’ experience, Trace One’s SaaS solutions are proven, robust, and stable. These solutions deliver a measurable return on investment, reducing time to market by up to 40% and ensuring 100% compliance with legislation and brand standards, reducing risks and costs.