Game Day Plan
Game Day beer was kicked off by 7-Eleven for the summer-fall sports season.
Marketing people at 7-Eleven hopes people will buy their beer so they won’t have to cry in it. But even teetotalers can go for the latest developments in private label teas, coffees and juices.
Is this the year for private label beer? Dallas, TX-based 7-Eleven, which happens to be the third-largest beer retailer in the U.S., is giving it another try with a brew called Game Day, after failing seven years ago with Santiago – which was positioned against Corona.
The launch in April at stores nationwide aimed to take advantage of the current economic downturn – a long, cold one for beer sales. “We’re really working back from the customers’ needs,” said Dan Skinner, 7-Eleven category manager for alcoholic beverages. “They’re looking for exceptional quality at a value price. We can give premium beers a run for their money.” Skinner said that Game Day had performed well in taste tests, including among suppliers of premium beers.
Game Day comes in two varieties. Game Day Light is 3.9 percent alcohol by volume and 110 calories per 12 ounces. Game Day Ice is 5.5 percent alcohol and 155 calories. The price is between $6.99 and $8.99 for a 12-pack, depending on local taxes and distribution costs, and 24-ounce singles are available for between $1.49 and $1.89.
This latest venture comes a year after 7-Eleven introduced Yosemite Road private-label wines. Skinner told Business Week in April that the launch had gone well, with the wines holding the No. 1 and No. 2 spots in the chain’s wine sales. As for the beer, craft beer fan All Everett who blogs about beer at hop-talk.com, was cautious: “If I was tailgating before a game, I’d certainly consider it. It’s probably not something that I would have regularly.”
Private label beer isn’t unknown, but it’s been a low-profile thing at supermarkets, appearing under brands that never advertise their connection to the retailer. “Private label hasn’t worked in beer so far,” observed Benj Steinman, editor of New York-based Beverage Business Insights. Game Day “is a new wrinkle and 7-Eleven is very serious about its effort,” he said. But he added that store-brand beers have to overcome brand loyalty as well as the fact there already are a number of different price points for beer: “I’m not ruling it out. I just say, ‘Show me’,” he said.
Cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay wines at $4 a bottle under 7-Eleven’s Yosemite Road brand are in the tradition of $2 Charles Shaw (“Two Buck Chuck”) at Trader Joe’s, Monrovia, CA, and $3 Oak Leaf at Walmart, Bentonville, AR. A blogger calling himself the Wine Curmudgeon wasn’t impressed by the Yosemite Road chardonnay (“It tastes like $4 wine.”), although he had good words for Oak Leaf: “The chardonnay was not over-oaked, as is often the case with cheap wine, and had real chardonnay green apple flavor. The merlot, which is usually cloyingly fruity at this price, had some backbone and the fruitiness had been kept down to a reasonable level.”
What Game Day, Yosemite Road, Oak Leaf and Charles Shaw have in common is that they are publicly identified with the retailers. The same is true of the Wine Cube line at Target, Minneapolis, MN – Riesling was added this year. Other private label beers and wines tend to be stealth brands, with neither the labels themselves nor the distribution clauses giving a clue as to their connection with the retailer. That may be changing now.
Cocktail mixers under store brands are getting more exposure these days. Wegmans, Rochester, NY, offers a 32-oz line that embraces Apple Martini, Bloody Mary, Chocolate Martini, Cosmopolitan, Lemon Drop Martini, Margarita, Mojito, Orange Pomegranate Martini and Watermelon Margarita, all at $6.99. Topco Associates, Skokie, IL, offers a similar line under its World Classics Treading Company brand.
In a more established beverage category, Trader Joe’s is trying something entirely different for the summer trade: pomegranate green tea by the gallon, made from kettle-brewed green tea, with “a splash of pomegranate and pear juices and a touch of pure cane sugar for sweetness.” To sweeten the deal for environmentally conscious shoppers, the chain sells the tea in 64-oz recyclable bottles at $2.99.
Ready-to-drink tea and tea-juice blends of one kind or another are all over the place in store brands these days. Canned and bottled tea sales in private label soared 42.5% to $36.1 million for the 52 weeks ended 5/16/2010, according to SymphonyIRI Group. (IRI), Chicago, IL, and there’s a lot of room for further growth with store brand share a mere 2.4%.
Wegmans offers two lines under the Food You Feel Good About sub-brand: Just Tea and Fruit Tea. Both come in 16.9 oz bottles and also in 67.6 and 64-oz economy sizes, respectively. Fruit teas, which are also beginning to appear in shrink-wrapped 12-packs at $9.99, include lemon black, lemon green, lychee green and peach oolong. Just Tea varieties are black, green, jasmine and oolong.
Topco’s World Classics Trading Company brand offers a line of sweetened fruit teas, including black with raspberry, green with ginseng and honey, black with pomegranate and white with tangerine. Target, Minneapolis, MN, markets varieties like Asian Pear Hibiscus white tea blend and Mangosteen Herbal red tea under its Archer Farms brand. Healthy blends like peach tea come under the Simply Balanced sub-brand.
In coffee, meanwhile, fair trade and sustainability are hot-button issues, and Walmart has made that a hot selling point for its Sam’s Choice line. “If every Wal-Mart shopper bought just one bag of Sam’s Choice® Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee, we would save more than 72,000 acres of tropical forest,” the discount giant declares in an online promo for coffees that are either Fair Trade or Rainforest Alliance certified.
Sam’s Choice Fair Trade Certified coffee guarantees fair prices, direct trade, environmental sustainability and community development for family farmers. Fair Trade helps improve the quality of life for small-scale family farmers by guaranteeing they are paid a fair price for their harvest. Sam’s Choice Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee ensures sustainable agricultural practices that protect the environment, ecosystems, and farm workers’ welfare.
Despite talk of coffee energy drinks in private label, RTD coffee in store brands thus far seems to be a non-starter except for four-pack latte drinks like World Classics at Topco. Despite the recession, however, premium bagged coffee lines continue to flourish, and a recent addition to the World Classics line of ground coffees is Hudson’s Choice.
Hudson who? He’s an imaginary world traveler invented six years ago by Topco as a spokesman for the premium brand. Like the real-life Wegman family members, his name appears on back-panel messages. In the case of Hudson’s Choice coffees, he doesn’t explain why he favors that rather than, say, Sumatra Mandheling or Cinnamon Viennese, but goes into a legend about an Ethiopian shepherd named Kaldi who noticed his sheep getting lively be eating some strange berries. Kaldi tried them himself, and found he didn’t have any trouble staying up all night to tend his sheep. And so was coffee discovered.
Well, it makes a good story. But there are other stories in other categories, such as staple juice variations at Giant Eagle, Pittsburgh, PA. Low-sodium tomato juice and spicy vegetable juice are addition to the store brand lineup there. Available in 46 oz bottles, both tout their vitamin content and are billed as natural sources of antioxidants. The tomato juice also boasts “enhanced tomato flavor."
