Now it looks like the salad bar lunch is gone for good.
Before the pandemic, salad bars and other prepared foods were becoming increasingly important to grocers as they pushed customers to shop in person, said Scott Mushkin, retail analyst at R5 Capital. However, in order for salad bars to work, customers need to use them quickly, otherwise the quality of the food will deteriorate or spoil. Grocers don’t want to serve food they can’t sell, so they keep it closed and devote the space to serving more prepared lunches and dinners. Some are turning the space into staging areas for workers to prepare customers’ online grocery orders, he said.
“The comfort of the clients is not huge from a sanitary point of view,” added Mushkin.
Giant Eagle plans to reintroduce salad bars in a limited number of stores over the next few weeks, but has phased them out in other stores and replaced them with take-out and ready-to-eat foods, Jannah Jablonowski said, door -speak. for the chain.
“Throughout the pandemic, [we’ve] saw a significant change in the purchasing habits and dietary preferences of our customers, â€she said in an email.
Stew Leonard’s, a Northeastern grocery chain, closed salad bars last spring and found prepared salads sold better than salads in bars once.
“Customers just like to buy a Caesar, Greek, garden chicken, cobb salad and go. We do all the work for them and they seem to like it better than bars,†said CEO Stew Leonard. The chain also sells prepackaged olives and Leonard said these products worked better than olive bars before the pandemic.
Whole Foods said on its website that many stores had “reopened previously closed self-service offers.” The company did not respond to a request for comment on whether or not to include salad bars.
Bristol Farms in California is an exception. It has reopened its salad bars, said Neil Stern, CEO of the chain’s parent company, Good Food Holdings.
But Stern said the traffic was lower than it was before the pandemic. He attributed this to the fact that buyers have fewer opportunities to use salad bars because they work more from home.
