Perfectly Paired Solutions for Meals Offer Food Pairing Options

Today’s shoppers are hungry for convenient, time-saving meal options that keep up with busy schedules. The Coca-Cola Company’s Perfectly Paired Solutions can meet these needs – while increasing loyalty and selling larger baskets – through Perfectly Paired Solutions for meals. The proprietary tool, which is also available for snacking solutions, allows customers to create additional food pairing, food and beverage bundles, and activation plans to use in-store.

Perfectly Paired Solutions provides insights and resources to meet retail market challenges head-on, and to grow beverage and food sales at grocery stores, supermarkets, and convenience retail stores. The comprehensive tool includes multi-dimensional strategies to help Coca-Cola customers sell not only more beverages, but more food items as well.

Consumer Demand for Meal Solutions
Shoppers are looking for meal solutions that are inspiring, fast, easy, and fresh in focus. Inspiring ideas appeal to millennials who seek solutions to help unleash their inner foodie.¹ It’s also important to attract the 63% of Americans deciding what to eat less than an hour before the mealtime.² Shoppers who purchase prepared meals are motivated by convenience and ease of use.³ Prepared meals are a quick alternative to preparing food from scratch for 72% of shoppers.⁴ And, interestingly, 76% of shoppers purchase prepared meals to have on hand when they don’t want to cook.⁴ Fresh food is a large consumer influencer, with consumers indicating the importance of fewer processed goods.⁵ Almost 30% of the top 25 grocery growth categories are in the chilled or perishable categories.⁴

A Comprehensive Approach 
With these market factors in mind, The Coca-Cola Company can help customers create a foodservice solution by evaluating opportunities in six categories: platform; people; products; pathways and pairings; picture of success (PicOS); and promotions. 

1. An Inconic Platform: Rather than simply place incremental racks or stack product in the deli, an iconic platform includes: an iconic name; exclusive deli presence; permanent deli activation; scale across chains/banners; three points of inspiration in deli (including one immediate consumption); and joint investment from customer. Incremental racks are just one part of the Perfectly Paired approach. Racks and displays are a vehicle for merchandising products, but not the basis to a successful platform. 
2. Identify people: Through The Coca-Cola Company’s proprietary insights, you can learn how consumers shop and gain insights into what shoppers think about in-store. Throughout the rest of the process, every decision is informed by this shopper understanding. 
3. Choose products: Coca-Cola® is the #1 beverage brand and goes well with food.⁵ More than one out of three occasions with food include a Coca-Cola branded beverage.⁵ Two times more Coke is consumed with lunch and dinner than the next closest brand.⁴ By exploring brands such as Coca-Cola®, Gold Peak® Tea and DASANI® through the Perfectly Paired Solutions tool, you can determine the best product mix for your store’s needs. 
4. Pathways and pairings: Create a customized meal solution by matching top-selling Coca-Cola® brands with four meal pathways: ready-to-serve, ready-to create, fresh-to-go, and special occasion/entertaining. 
5. Picture of Success: The Perfectly Paired Solutions tool allows Coke customers to explore a virtual store map that highlights a variety of foodservice activation opportunities based on meal pathways (ready to serve, ready to create, and fresh to go) and store zones (deli, center, and perimeter).
6.  Innovative Promotions: Once you determine the ideal foodservice strategy built on an iconic platform, informed by shopper insights, driven by #1 brand products, and designed around meal pathways, it’s time to hit “go” with dedicated promotions. Focused on reaching shoppers across their path to purchase – from pre-shop rituals, to television and social media, to couponing and in-store engagement – The Coca-Cola Company focuses strategic promotions to keep meal solutions top-of-mind in the shopper’s routine. 

Finally, The Coca-Cola Company ensures meal activation strategy functions at full capacity and provides comprehensive performance metrics and ROI data.

To learn more about how you can leverage the Perfectly Paired Solutions tool to grow foodservice sales, talk to your Coke representative today. 

Read Related Stories:
Maximize Sales with Food and Beverage Combos 
Food Goes Better with Coke®
Time to Rethink the Combo Meal
Embrace Meal Planning to Grow Grocery Sales

^{Sources:
¹ Kantar, “A Millennial and Her Grocery Store”, October 2015
² Wall Street Journal, Forget Dinner, It’s Always Snack Time in America, July 2014
³ Mintel, Prepared Meals and Side Dishes, May 2014
⁴ FMI Grocery Industry Trends 2015, Food IQ 2015, Nielson Retail Execution Audit custom study 2015, NPD Group Survey 2014, Coca-Cola iSHOP 2015, Mintel, Prepared Foods May 2016, Nielsen Strategic Planner and Nielsen Perishables, 52 w/e 9/26/15
⁵ Consumer Beverage Landscape 2015}