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If you browse the media seeking answers about the future of gourmet foods, you’ll encounter a bounty of conflicting pieces that have to be neatly intertwined into an intricate puzzle. First, we’re an obese country obsessed with healthy trends. We are also a convenience-seeking nation with a fixation on gourmet foods. And finally, we are time-starved worker bees wishing to return to the family dinner table. What does this all mean to the cookware category? A lot. Designing your Cookware Department with an eye toward healthy cooking, time-saving cooking methods, and oven-to-table items (saves time on cleanup) will help to attract today’s gourmet consumers to your store.

Cooking New Trends
Consumer demand for convenience and innovation is affecting every category of housewares. And no pot, pan, or cookie sheet is safe from adaptation or extinction.
“Everyone is trying to make things different by adding lips or pour spouts. While at the end of the day, it’s the added convenience that can make it or break it at retail,” began Peter Greene, president of NPD Houseworld. “While manufacturers try to continue to innovate in shapes and sizes, the challenge is getting shelf space to display it. Clearly having the right assortment from a retailer perspective is going to help everyone win. So having a perspective of the marketplace — where it’s been and where it’s going — is going to help them.”
A recent report pinpoints the number of gourmet consumers to be nearly one-fifth of American adults. These consumers are looking beyond the basics in cookware. They are ready and willing to experiment. They follow and push the curve for emerging culinary trends. Learning these customers’ interests and then catering to them is the key to cookware success.
Terry Monroe, partner in Stillwater, Oklahoma-based Murphy’s Depart-ment Store, said the most influential period for cookware sales is the fourth quarter. For it’s during those months that his customers are trying out new recipes and shopping the store for cookware items to meet holiday-entertaining needs.
“It’s always been a pretty strong area for us. We used to do a lot of Calphalon, but now we’ve picked up Emerilware and All-Clad and Meyer. They have been strong for us in the basic cookware,” Monroe began. “We do a lot of fall seasonal items, and we try to anticipate the demand for Thanksgiving and Christmas since that’s the time when people are thinking about what they’ll need for the recipes they’re making and they realize they don’t have the right pan or need a special product. We try to anticipate what those products might be and stock them. If you have it, you make the sale. If you don’t, it’s too late to special order.”
While specialty cookware is a small part of the overall cookware category tracked by NPD Houseworld, the influence of celebrity chefs demonstrating these products on an hourly basis will keep gourmet consumers interested in the category.
“I think a lot of awareness is generated by these cooking shows. While Americans may not be using their cookware as they used to, they certainly want to feel good about what they are using,” Greene said. “This is another category where the middle ground is lessening and we’re experiencing a polarization. The high end is doing very well. A consumer still might be shopping for a basic fry pan, but they’ll want the Lexus of fry pans.”
NPD data suggests that open-stock sales are declining slightly from 48 percent (July’03-June’04) to 46.4 percent (July’04-June’05). But for items beyond the basics — paella pans, oval pans, cataplanas, fondue pots, crepe pans, tempura cookers, karhai, and more, open stock is the only route from the retailer to the consumer.
When evaluating stock type, NPD data shows little shift in the popularity of styles within the category. Griddles and grills saw an incremental increase in sales, while fry/skillets/sautés experienced a 1.4-percent decline. Stir-frys/woks also saw a slight increase in units sold. Cookware styles categorized as “other” or “not applicable” were credited with a near two-percent increase in units sold. Perhaps that number is an indication of growth beyond the basics.
Watching out for trends that will influence consumers becomes more essential in the search beyond basic cookware. If a celebrity chef is constantly using paella pans on his/her show, perhaps consumers will latch onto the product and make it the next best seller. Or will it be the mussel pot featured on the front of a glossy consumer magazine that makes the grade?
The key to determining these trends is matching media messages with consumer lifestyles. With a few pieces of information, you can try to determine what products will make the cut. Still, there is a large margin of subjective thinking. Practicality would tell you that while the tagine is an incredibly beautiful piece of cookware, its functionality for the home chef is limited. While there will always be a marketplace for tagines, it’s not an item to stock broadly or deep. It is an item for special order, a niche cookware product that tells its own tale with great merchandising and descriptive signage. Tagines also beg for demonstration, as do many niche cookware items that are better explained to the consumer by example.

What’s Selling
So what is hot in cookware these days?
We asked some experts — both trend forecasters and retailers themselves — what they saw happening in the marketplace.
Harry Balzer, a vice president of the NPD Group’s Food Consulting services, has been tracking the eating patterns of a sample of the American population for over 20 years. He quipped that the fastest-growing appliance in the American home is the power window in the car.
“The America restaurant is the fastest-growing use of home preparation — Americans love take-out,” he began. “Americans want to do as little as possible and that’s visible if you look at some of the appliances that have done well in the past decade. The barbecue gas grill, the bread maker, the indoor grill, the slow cooker . . . all have the same thing in common with the drive-through window — it’s how America prepares a meal, cooking without cookware.”
So what does that mean for the cookware category? Well, it’s not as bad as you might think.
Balzer points out that the stovetop is still the number-one appliance being used in America. While the figure is just below 50 percent (it was 66 percent in 1985), that’s still a large number of households firing up the stove each night. And they have to cook in something.
“There are two ways to look at it,” Balzer explained. “If you focus on the trend that people are drinking less coffee, Starbucks would not be in existence. So while less people may be turning on the stove now than in the past, half the people in the country are going to turn on the stove. So what’s important is how you make the stovetop easier to use.”
Tex Harrison, owner of Complements to the Chef in Asheville, N.C., is looking at a resurgence in pressure cooker sales. It seems this handy cookware item is meeting the need of consumers looking to save time, plus it’s convenient.
“We carry Kuhn Rikon. People like it because you don’t have to be over a hot stove. They are not inexpensive $99 to $159, but I don’t think anyone is bothered by it,” Harrison said. “Slow cookers are also very popular right now. With All-Clad and Cuisinart coming out with their own versions, it makes them a completely new category for gourmet stores. Slow cooker cookbooks are also popular.”
Another hot seller for Harrison fills the niche of healthy eating. After all, they say breakfast is the day’s most important meal. It’s also a great example of a manufacturer bringing innovation to a category that can sometimes become stagnant.
She explained, “Swiss Diamond introduced a Breakfast Pan that is thick on one side and thin on the other so the omelette just falls right off. It’s nine inches across and can be used as an omelette, crepe, or griddle pan. You won’t break anything sliding it off. It’s really different and no one has ever thought of reinventing the omelette pan. At $89.99, our customers love it. Price isn’t really a problem.”

Ethnic Influences
Another influence on cookware buying patterns is the popularity of particular food trends and shifts in ethnic populations. Whether it’s the culinary trend of the moment or new ethnic influences in your area, you can fulfill customers’ needs with shallow inventory and special orders.
Monroe caters to the shifting university population in his area by providing a wide breadth of special-order products.
“We’re doing a lot of special-order items. We have a large number of people who need things for Asian cooking and we special order those products,” he said. “We try to have a representative supply of things. We carry rice cookers up to a certain size and then special order the larger-volume units. We try and have enough so that people recognize that we are in those categories.”
As with most parts of the country, Harrison said she’s felt the influence of Latin-inspired cuisine.
“Paella pans are the biggest for us. We have a big display with the cookbook, the rice, the paprika, and saffron. It’s all sold separately but merchandised together so people can understand the story. You just take it home and cook,” she said.

Cooking Up Sales
Behind every successful category lies strong marketing and merchandising support. Add to that a knowledgeable sales floor team and you have your own recipe for success.
Monroe invests a lot in advertising his wares in the local newspaper, negotiating contract rates that keep things manageable. In addition, he believes smart merchandising will explain the story to customers shopping the store.
“In Oklahoma, you have to expose people to specialty and cookware items in a display or an ad early in the season and then hope that later they will think they need the item as a gift or for their own entertaining,” he said.
Harrison merchandises her successful pressure cooker category as a group to illustrate the range of sizes to the shopper.
“It’s not a really visible category when you come into the store. We have them with the slow cookers, but some people don’t want to plug in an appliance and cook their food all day,” Harrison explained. “We also have vegetarian cookbooks for pressure cookers that we cross-merchandise. People are very happy with the idea of cooking vegetables in a pressure cooker. It’s not something that they were necessarily aware was possible. But pressure cookers go great with vegetables.”
Harrison said her cookware sales are heating up alongside successful marketing by major brands. By taking advantage of gift-with-purchase and promotional set pricing, she’s also been able to introduce customers to uniquely sized pans and a variety of cookware materials.
“We do well with a lot of non-stick, even with the bad press. Our customers like Viking stainless steel products and we also show every piece that All-Clad makes so you have a lot of choices from sauciers to braiser pans,” Harrison explained. “Cookware isn’t going up like gasoline — it’s a reasonable investment.”