Cut open, wrap and display: easy solutions for your produce area

With so many fresh fruit items to choose from in a produce department, the consumer can often be overwhelmed.  What should I buy today? What is that? What does it look like inside?  Do they make kiwi fruit that is red inside (or gold or green)?

Displaying cut fruit also gives a feeling of liveliness to the department.  It is just another way to seduce our senses.

So many items could benefit from being cut open and displayed.  And it is so simple to do – pick up the item, slice it in half, wrap in plastic and put on display.

It should take no less than a minute and it is an easy way to reach out to the consumer – especially if you are short on labour.

In some stores I’ve seen stickers applied that say “for display only” or “not for sale”.  If you don’t have stickers another easy solution is to use a black magic marker – add display only or sample only.  I would go one step further and write what the item is instead of leaving the shopper to figure out what the item is – is it a clementine or a mandarin?

Shoppers are a curious lot – how many seeds, what is the colour, how juicy or dry does it look?

Perhaps the citrus has a thick skin with large juicy filled segments.  Perhaps it is an orange but once opened you see it is really a blood orange.  Or maybe the peel is greenish and you want to show shoppers that it is ripe and ready to eat. Often the shopper wants a little assurance of what she or he is picking up.

While I was wandering through a fresh produce department, I spotted two nice examples of fresh fruit cut open, wrapped in clear plastic to show the inside and preserve the life of the display. It's just another simple way to make use of your best resource–the produce–to boost sales.