Boil up sales

Both pasta and rice are tasty, filling and incredibly versatile — Americans eat roughly 20 pounds of pasta and 25 pounds of rice each year. Pasta and rice are also relatively inexpensive, even when offered under a name brand. So low prices alone often are not enough to get shoppers to buy the store brand pasta or rice.

According to the Mintel report “Dry Pasta, Rice and Noodles — US,” released in February, pasta and rice sales are currently “stagnant.” One reason for the slump is that customers want more than just basic pantry staples from the category — particularly with the recession over and with the rise of ethnic flavors and premium products.

“Introducing new and creative flavors and varieties should aid in encouraging more sales,” the report states.

Retailers can find a lot of untapped product varieties and health trends, however, that coupled with store brand value, could have them seeing increased store brand sales.

Offer something new

As the Mintel report notes, one challenge for the pasta, rice and noodle market is that shoppers feel it “offers little in innovation.” Store shelves are filled mostly with the same pasta varieties and brown and white rice products that have seemingly always been there. One way retailers could get shoppers more interested in rice is through offering varieties that maybe they haven’t tried, or even seen, before. “Obviously there are black, purple, red, etc., colored rices, but manufacturers are just starting to tap into the possibilities of using these as ingredients in packaged goods,” says Aram Karapetian, vice president of sales and marketing for Waukegan, Ill.-based Woodland Foods, an importer and supplier of specialty food ingredients.

He points to Himalayan red rice as an example of a versatile product that could potentially have lots of shopper appeal.

“It’s basically a whole-grain rice, like brown

 rice, so it is naturally more nutritious than white rice,” Karapetian says. “Also, its vibrant red color is appealing, even fun for consumers, and it has such a great, slightly sweet flavor.”

And there are lots of other little-seen rice types besides Himalayan red.

“It’s easy to assemble a whole line of store brand specialty rice products,” Karapetian notes.

The same goes for pasta.

“Handmade pasta, unique shapes, toasted and rolled in semolina like fregola sarda or whole-grain pastas are definite winners these days,” he says.

In addition to grabbing customer interest, new pasta and rice varieties can speak to increased consumer demand for exciting or ethnic flavors, even in the meals cooked at home.

“It is important to remember that value-conscious consumers who purchase private label goods are still motivated in a large way by flavor,” Karapetian says.

Think fresh

According to “Pasta in the US,” a recent report from London-based Euromonitor, private label “remains the leader” in the U.S. pasta market, claiming 23 percent of value sales in 2013. But with increased consumer demand for fresher, less-processed foods, retailers could reach more shoppers by offering store brand fresh or chilled pasta varieties. Chilled/fresh pasta, rather than the boxed kind, was actually the fastest-growing pasta category in 2013.

“Chilled/fresh pasta continues to benefit from the perception that it is a premium product and is more authentic than dried pasta,” the report states. It also “offers an opportunity for manufacturers to tap into consumers’ desire for authenticity by packaging pasta in ways that make it appear manufactured by hand.”

Focus on health

From gluten-free pastas to non-GMO rice, retailers need to keep health advantages in mind when selling store brand pasta and rice.

“The pasta industry is trying to do its best to come up with different ways to make sure that people are still perceiving pasta as a very healthy item to eat,” says Joe Viviano, director of sales and marketing at Philadelphia-based Philadelphia Macaroni Co., a co-packer of pasta products.

One of the easiest trends to pursue is that toward whole grains, Karapetian says.

According to the 2014 Food and Health Survey recently released by the D.C.-based International Food Information Council Foundation (IFICF), fiber and whole grains are the top nutrients that American consumers are looking to include in their diets, with more than two-thirds of them able to correctly identify the benefits of whole-grain consumption.

Messaging that clearly identifies a pasta or rice as a whole-grain product will get noticed, but retailers might also gain sales by featuring the Whole Grain Stamp, created by the Boston-based Whole Grains Council, on their store brand pasta or rice. The stamp notes the number of whole grains per serving, and according to the council, sales data from Schaumburg, Ill.-based SPINS, a retail consumer insights agency, show that whole-grain products with the stamp sell better than those without it.

Another health-focused pasta trend just starting to hit the market involves the inclusion of vegetables. While vegetable powders were used in the past mostly for adding hints of color to a pasta dish, the latest veggie-containing pastas — such as Barilla’s new Veggie Pasta and Ronzoni’s Garden Delight Pasta — are made with pureed or dried vegetables and boast a full serving of vegetables.

“I think we are going to see a big bang on the vegetable pasta coming up in the next year,” Viviano says.

Store brand gluten-free pasta and rice are also musts for retailers, although Viviano says the trend might be slowing a little. Rice happens to be naturally gluten-free, but retailers should take care to make clear on the package, if selling glutinous rice products, that the “glutinous” labeling just means the product is sticky after being cooked and doesn’t actually contain gluten.

There’s also the non-GMO trend. It has yet to take off the way other trends such as gluten-free have, but still is worth considering in terms of product development.

“While every retailer is obviously going to do their own research into the subject and make their own decisions about call-outs on packaging, the increased coverage can translate into increased interest, and savvy retailers can take advantage of that,” Karapetian says. The Barilla brand, which Euromonitor cites as a close second to private label in pasta sales, stated that it plans to keep its pasta products GMO-free, so it probably would not be a bad claim to have in terms of remaining competitive.

Clean labeling is also important, and according to Karapetian, it involves more than simply putting claims such as “natural” on the package.

“It also involves an increased interest in multiple aspects of product origins, everything from the use of heritage grains to the country of origin to fair-trade certification; the list goes on and on,” he says.

Label transparency, health claims and freshness are only part of the successful selling of store brand pasta and rice, though — just as important are packaging and marketing.

Packaging should “convey a sense of the flavor of the product, details about how it was made [and] its ingredients’ sources, and still be visually appealing,” says Karapetian, adding that retailers also can’t go wrong with customer education. “Shelf talkers, in-store demos and web specials with product-specific exposés would all help accelerate the trend by making the more fringe products more accessible,” he adds.