Organic foods claim a bigger share of grocery carts
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a weekly market report on organic fruits and vegetables in April, acknowledgement that natural and organic foods now claim a big share of the mainstream U.S. consumer’s grocery cart.
According to the USDA’s Amber Waves magazine, the past decade has seen a major change in organic product retailing. Independent and small-chain health-food stores used to be the main conduit to market for these products. By 2006, approximately half of all organic food was sold through such conventional channels as Safeway and Costco.
While fruits and vegetables have been top sellers in the organic category since 1997, non-produce items, such as beverages, packaged and prepared foods and, yes, snacks, accounted for 63% of consumer spending on organics in 2008.
You can learn more about this changing sector in the USDA’s Marketing U.S. Organic Foods: Recent Trends from Farms to Consumers. You can learn a good deal about the sector’s current appetite for imports (including natural product and conventional distribution channels) from The Datamyne’s U.S. imports and bill-of-lading databases: just ask us.