Branded goods to benefit from online growth

Own-label is no longer going to have the prominence that it had over the past 10 years, and food manufacturers will turn back to branded goods, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones predicted.

“Consumers are not going to have the same feeling about buying an own-label product from the same online retailer that they buy their vacuum-cleaner from, so it’s really going to be brands that are the ones responsible for communicating to consumers,”​ he said.

According to Emmanuel-Jones, conventional retailers will go back to their original role as “hubs of distributing food produce”.​

‘Distributing food produce’​

“We see Sainsbury buying into Argus, and that’s because they realise that their future is going to be as a distribution hub.”​

He believed that there would either be less in-store shopping, or that in-shore shoppers would behave “considerably differently​” to how they do at the moment.

“I think retailers were the hubs of the analogue age – and they went into services like banking, and petrol stations. But the digital age caught them out, and now everyone is working out how to make the online environment pay.”​

The trend toward branded goods was being further exacerbated by the growth of the eating out market, he claimed.

‘​Convenience to be the future’​​

“What we have to remember is that 50% of the food consumed in this country is eaten outside the home. Convenience is going to be the future, and consumers want to have a relationship with the people who produce their food. And you can’t have a relationship with a big conglomerate.”​

The Black Farmer brand produces a range of branded gluten-free sausages, meatballs, burgers and chicken products – along with branded eggs and cheese.

While the company itself doesn’t manufacture, Emmanuel-Jones said he takes his “hat off to those producers that face unrelenting pressure from supermarkets”.​

However, he warned that “you could be the most efficient manufacturer making the best quality foods, but if you don’t know how to market them, you will fail.​

“In the past decade, manufacturers haven’t really had to worry about marketing – it’s the supermarkets that have been doing all the communicating with consumers,” ​Emmanuel-Jones said.

“When the climate changes, manufacturers are going to have to develop that skill. And it will be vital to remove any clash of culture between the people who produce your product and the people who market it,”​ he added.