Saturday, February 25, 2012

Things They Should Invent: customized crudités

The problem with eating veggies and salads is all the chopping up and washing you have to do. Grocery stores are addressing this by selling pre-made salads and packages of crudités. But the problem is that they don't always contain what you want. For example, I love cucumber slices, but you can't just buy a thing of cucumber slices. The cucumber slices come in a thing with carrots, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, and sometimes dip. I don't mind carrots and celery, I prefer my broccoli cooked, I'm not fond of cauliflower, and I'm not actively seeking dip. So there's less yummy (and more calories) than the thing I want.

But what if you could order them customized? Fill out a form on the grocery store's website telling them what you want, and you can pick it up within a certain timeframe. The price will reflect the ingredients you've chosen.

At first glance this sounds like it might be more expensive, but I think it would actually be cheaper for the store. The current business model is the store guesses what people will want, puts it out on the shelf as prepared food or in the salad bar as separate ingredients, and hopes everything will be bought. If they aren't bought, the store has to throw them out. But if they're custom-made, then the store knows that they're wanted, so there's a better preparation-to-sales ratio and less waste. The stores already have workers who prepare the prepared food and a pricing model that takes into account workers' salaries and revenues from less than 100% of the food being sold. It seems like they could expand to customization at no increased expense to the customer and a slightly greater profit margin.

4 comments:

laura k said...

It's a great idea. Cauliflower is the one food I truly hate, and I also prefer broccoli slightly cooked. The presence - omnipresence! - of cauliflower in the pre-washed, pre-chopped veggies is always a deal-breaker for me. I don't want to buy the mix and throw away a quarter of it.

Expanding on your idea, if the store had enough staffing, customers could pick up an order slip upon entering the store, check off what they wanted, drop the slip off at the deli counter, do all their shopping, then return to pick up their veggies of choice.

impudent strumpet said...

Absolutely! I suggested internet ordering because the veggie-making people aren't always working when I'm in the store, but if they can accommodate it in real time then that would be even better!

They also might be able to learn about consumer preferences from the custom orders they get. If no one is asking for cauliflower, maybe they can make fewer of the pre-made ones with cauliflower, and then more would get sold and less would go to waste.

Lorraine said...

It would seem that even a vending machine could be devised to deliver such a salad. Like the old-school coffee machine, you hold down whatever buttons for whatever extras. Since there's fresh (but of course uncut--think Cuisinart under the hood) goods inside it won't make it to as many locations as the coffee machine--but in a dupermarket setting there should be the resources to clean and re-stock--if you can sneak it past the vending machine mafia.

impudent strumpet said...

That would work for ingredients with good turnover, where the machine will use them up before they go bad.