In Print » August 2011 » Features » Best Merchandising Ideas

The picture of health, today's high-quality juicers look great and perform even better. And with so many of us looking to eat more healthfully, it's not surprising that more and more consumers are turning to juicers to tune up their diets. As a retailer who may be looking to expand your offerings in this category, look for a supplier who offers a range of juicers at different price points and styles. This will enable you to create a complete picture of healthy lifestyle appliances for your customers.

Spa Day
While the state of the economy has impacted some folks' discretionary spending on things like spa vacations, it hasn't curbed our nation's enthusiasm for better health. Help your customers to recreate the spa experience at home — at least from a spa beverage standpoint — with the assistance of one of the kitchen's healthiest small electrics: The juicer. Host a Spa Day or a Spa Weekend during which you demo your high-performance juicers and some of the tasty spa-inspired beverages that can be made quickly and easily with a juicer. You may even want to create "Spa Menu" cards that list the beverages you are sampling and their ingredients for customers to take home.

As you serve up delicious samples of carrot-celery-apple or apple-beet juice, educate your customers about the different styles of juicers. There's the straight-up citrus-style juicer for consumers interested in freshly made orange, grapefruit and other citrus juices. Perfect for small families is the centrifugal-style juicer, which holds the pulp inside its basket in order to continue to spin the pulp and extract juice. These juicers are ultra-efficient and easy to clean. Then there's the pulp-ejection-style juicer, which ejects the pulp into a separate container, allowing it to produce more juice while maintaining high efficiency. Finally, there's the masticating juicer; this low-speed juicer can do it all — make juice like the centrifugal- and pulp-ejection-style juicers as well as juice wheatgrass and leafy greens. What's more, masticating units have non-juicing functions for pasta extrusion and making homemade nut butters.

As you demo the heavier duty juicers, be sure to remind customers that when juicing combinations of fruits and vegetables, the best results are yielded when you alternate the two. Create a soothing environment in which your customers can receive this information and enjoy their juice samples by incorporating other spa-like items from your store in your demo area. This may include candles, attractive pitchers for serving the juices, fresh veggies displayed on a beautiful platter, etc.

Lemonade Stand
Like the scent of freshly cut grass and outdoor barbecues, lemonade stands are among the quintessential hallmarks of summer. Attract the attention of parents and kids alike by creating a colorful lemonade stand either on your store floor or just outside your front door. Of course, yours isn't going to be an ordinary sugar-laden, nutritionally anemic lemonade stand. This is going to be a secretly vitamin- and nutrient-packed lemonade stand. You and the parents shopping your store will know it's healthy lemonade, but, hopefully, the kids will think it's just the same old lemonade they love to drink.

Pass out samples of freshly made apple lemonade, pear lemonade, and orange-grapefruit lemonade. One of the reasons these fresh lemonades are so much healthier is that they combine sweeter fruits with the lemons rather than adding heaps of sugar. Some of the recipes allow you to use the skin and peel of the fruit, as well, thereby extracting the health benefits from these parts of the fruit. Create recipe cards for each juice that you sample so parents can see you're using only the freshest, best ingredients.

The Whole Deal
In the world of juicers, one of the most notable developments of late has been the availability of units that are approved for both household and commercial use. The fact that consumers can have the same juicer in their kitchen as the one behind the counter at their favorite neighborhood juice bar is a strong selling point.

These powerful juicers offer versatility when it comes to preparing a variety of healthful juices and foods from whole ingredients. Some juicers allow you to take whole foods like peanuts or almonds and make your own nut butters. They also allow you to create a feast of freshly made pasta with the pasta extruder feature. Perhaps most importantly, they quickly and easily turn whole, fresh fruits and vegetables into the most delicious and nutritious beverages. And don't forget the pulp. More than a by-product of juicing, pulp packs a punch in a variety of applications, from flavoring soups to moistening cakes to reinventing salads. When diluted with water, pulp also can be used to make healthy homemade baby food.

Through informative signage, attention-grabbing demos and thoughtful merchandising, your customers soon will know the whole story behind today's high-end juicers — a story that finds them living happily and healthfully ever after with a high-performance juicer from your store.