Here’s a segment-by-segment look at where customized consumer-packaged goods and supermarket offerings are of interest to quick-serves:
Pizza: This is the biggest arena for a potential clash between up-and-coming customized products and quick-serves. Executives from Domino’s, Little Caesars, and Pizza Hut were unavailable for comment, but presumably they have an eye cocked toward developments like the Freschetta Build & Bake, which packages pizza components separately, and Kraft’s latest pre-prepared DiGiorno entry, a premium-ingredient product called Ultimate.
“Customizable pizza is the one part of quick-service that is most susceptible to competition because DiGiorno’s has already been successful for Kraft in taking some share from quick-service pizza,” says Paul, of Technomic.
Refrigerated Freschetta’s proposition is simple: offering, “the ultimate personalized customized pizza,” says Chad Guillory, director of business development for the Bloomington, Minnesota-based company. It’s the first truly national brand of component pizzas in the refrigerator case, he says.
To start, Build & Bake customers can select either a two-pack Traditional or Crispy Italian Style Thin crust, each for a suggested price of $4.49, or a seven-inch, three-pack Traditional crust for $2.99. Two sauce options are offered, Pizza or Zesty Italian Style, for a suggested $2.89. Topping choices include: pepperoni, Canadian bacon, a four-cheese blend, and a premium four-cheese blend, at prices ranging from $3.09 to $3.69.
With nearly 1,000 restaurants open across the country, Papa Murphy’s—offering customized, call-in and take-out-ready pizzas within four minutes—has been putting its own pressure on the big delivery and sit-down pizza quick-serves as well as local independent pizzerias. Freschetta, says Papa Murphy’s Evans, simply represents an expansion on the concept pioneered by refrigerated take-and-bake pizzas that Costco and Sam’s Club warehouse chains have been offering for awhile—though the customer doesn’t get to customize the product per se.
While he concedes that customized grocer pizzas represent yet another option for consumers, Evans notes that Papa Murphy’s has “utmost confidence in our freshness proposition.” Moreover, he believes that the $5 or $6 that Papa Murphy’s typically charges for its biggest seller, a large pepperoni pizza, is a price point that’s difficult for grocery stores to beat with a quality product. “Ultimately, they can’t compete on price,” he says, “and if they do it becomes sort of a Totino’s type, commoditized product.”
Light Entrees: “Steaming” has been supercharging sales in the once-moribund category of frozen vegetables over the last several months, with Birds Eye and other manufacturers offering products in which vegetables and sauce are housed separately, steamed, and then combined by the consumer. The idea is that microwave steaming makes food look and taste better rather than simply cooking regular frozen fare. And steaming is 25 percent faster than regular microwaving.
Now, ConAgra and others are applying the technology that makes microwave steaming possible to meals. “The advantage of steaming is that it starts to deliver restaurant-style quality at just an arm’s-length convenience,” says Partryka of Healthy Choice’s Café Steamers. “Before, we hadn’t been able to deliver the quality of quick-service meals.” Consumers, Partryka says, are looking for home-prepared meals that offer “something closer to real freshness.”