Re:How Goya brought ethnic food to white America
by mbell on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @12:22AM
(#6288010)
Currently hacking away on the food industry:
It's common practice for a distributor to handle stocking of product in some/many locations, it's referred to as 'merchandising' in the industry, it's often limited to speciality products. Given the comment I think the interesting thing is that either Goya is doing their own distribution or has subcontracted that out or has a special distributor relationship in some way. It's relatively uncommon for products which are in the supermarket 'core' (true for Goya at least of my local stores) to get this treatment, so that seems to say something about Goya.
This is also very common in the alcohol industry, e.g. the huge Bud Light displays you'll see in stores are usually setup by distributors, not the store owner.
I worked for a supermarket when in high school and only store employees handled goods inside the building. Here the store allowed control of an entire aisle to Goya. And believe me, shelf space is at the very core of retail sales.