Estratégia de gerenciamento de categorias: um estudo de caso para o segmento de alimentos plant based

Abstract

The market for plant-based products, in Portuguese “plant-based”, has been growing over the years and gaining the taste of consumers looking for alternative products to those of animal origin. In parallel to this, retail, as a whole, has faced high market competitiveness and has been looking for alternatives to stand out from competitors. Based on this, many companies have implemented the ECR (Efficient Consumer Response) concept, whose ultimate objective is to generate an effective system, aimed at consumers, in which distributors and suppliers work together as commercial allies in order to minimize costs. Thus, it is expected to reduce losses and increase inventory turnover, obtaining resources to keep the business going. In this sense, Category Management emerged as a response to the growing challenge of the sector to satisfy the consumer. It is a partnership process between the retailer and the supplier that consists of managing the various categories of items as business units, and brings better commercial results as benefits. Based on this, the way in which the products are displayed on the shelves impacts the consumer's perception of the product and with this, category management strategies are used to determine the best way of exposure and add value to the product. However, differentiated items such as plant based items still do not have a specific layout definition, and most supermarkets display them in a dispersed way on the shelves. Taking into account the need for information on this topic, the present study aimed to create a plant-based category in a supermarket chain and to evaluate its sales performance after implementation. Treating the category as a business unit, and grouping the line, it was possible to significantly increase the monthly average billing of these items in the supermarket chain, reduce returns, in addition to boosting the development of items that make up the mix Therefore, the exposure grouping of these types of products positively influences the performance of the category.