Providing excellent customer service starts long before the face-to-face interactions we have every day in the aisles. Considering the customer when planning, ordering, setting and maintaining your departments is essential to creating an experience that will delight your shoppers.

Food co-ops hang their hats on their fresh departments—it is hard to beat the beautiful selection of high-quality produce, meat, seafood and healthy, homemade prepared foods that co-ops offer. It is our job to make sure that these items are prominent, abundant and shown off to their best advantage during all operating hours. Don’t accept “the way it’s always done” as a strategy, consider a few of these essential tips—what could you implement today?

• Use your space well. When building promotional displays make sure to allocate plenty of linear footage for your display. This will help to eliminate possible short stocks and reduce the number of times needed to keep the display full throughout the day. Have ample inventory on hand for replenishment before you leave for the day.
• Clearly price items. Make sure all items in your department are clearly priced. More often than not, retailers do a poor job pricing individual items such as secondary items included in a cross merchandising display, items merchandised on endcaps, J-hooks and clip strips.
• Include meaningful labels. For prepared foods and value-added meat products that contain two or more added ingredients, make sure to list the ingredients on the label in order of predominance for your customers. For full service cases, use placards to disclose ingredients. When appropriate, include on-package cooking/reheating instructions or recipe card handouts for as many items as possible.
• Set the stage. Customers’ impressions form within seconds of entering your department—take a fresh look at your space through their eyes, what engages your senses? Department cleanliness will only catch your customer’s eye if it’s missing. Fresh departments have messy foods that rot, drip, ooze and even explode! A regular and consistent cleaning routine is essential. Incorporate major fixture cleaning in the morning set routine—if you have multiple refrigerated cases or fixtures, keep it manageable with a rotating rack cleaning schedule. Wiping down your department can be part of a shift change—spot check and clean those meat, produce and deli department shelves, display bumpers, edges, plastic sign holders, floors and rugs. Empower everyone to clean the sales floor, not just the custodian.
• Seal the deal. Customers have high standards—think about your own expectations for service when you are shopping. If customers don’t like the service they get somewhere, they can always “order it from Amazon” next time and avoid a face-to-face experience altogether. Your co-op might offer customer service training, but consider posting or reiterating some of these points regularly in your department to keep them prominent in your mind on the sales floor.

1. Acknowledge customers within a few seconds of their arrival in your department.
2. Discontinue conversations with coworkers if customers are present.
3. If you see someone lingering over a decision, offer a sample if possible.
4. If you don’t know the answer to a question, find someone who does, but stay with your customer until they’ve been satisfied.

And a bonus tip for meat and seafood departments:

• Give your customers choices. Offer more variety when displaying meat cuts in your full- and self-service meat cases. Your middle meat steak section should always have a few freshly cut 2- and 3-inch steaks available. Split any fresh cut steaks the following day and replace with a new set of thick cuts. Bone-in and boneless pork chops should also have a few thick and thin varieties. Offer prepackaged ground beef in 1, 2 and 3 lb. packages. In your seafood displays offer a few whole salmon fillets that can be cut specific to order rather than pre-portioning every fillet. You should also include a variety of sizes of roasts especially, chuck roasts, shoulder roasts, pork shoulder butts and bone-in and boneless pork loin roasts.

Hungry for more fresh tips? Check out our preferred practices for meat departments, produce departments and prepared foods departments. Preferred practices for customer service and sampling are also available.

The author gratefully acknowledges Linda McCann for her contributions to this article.