According to Wikipedia, a supermarket is: “[…] a departmentalized self-service store offering a wide variety of food and household merchandise.” Simple. Factual. Not very exciting.
Similarly, Wiki defines the face as “[…] the front part of the head, in humans from the forehead to chin including the hair, forehead, eyebrow, eyes, nose, cheeks, mouth, lips, philtrum, teeth, skin, and chin.” Yet, when we look at the Mona Lisa, Brad Pitt, or our children, we see so much more. It is the same with supermarkets.

Between the mid-1920s and early-1930s, in both Europe and the United States, the supermarket was born, and the slow death of the outdoor market began. The conventional supermarket layout is the result of a long evolutionary process of design. The product of the process is approaching an optimal win-win solution, where the consumers feel they have done a good shop and are likely to return, and the store has sold as much as possible as quickly as possible. It must also be architected to enable extremely efficient delivery systems, stock-filling, customer parking, checkout, and associated services. Producing a layout that is functional, unique, attractive, affordable and user-friendly is no easy task.

The supermarket’s evolution
As society has evolved, so has the supermarket. The first supermarkets in the US were massive stores, often housed in abandoned warehouses or factories. While nominally independent, the stores often sold huge volumes of mass-produced goods and opened branch stores. The most famous and one of the earliest self-proclaimed supermarkets, Big Bear, opened in late 1932 in an old car factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey (US). The market boasted a soda fountain and hardware and paint departments, all in addition to a very large grocery section. King Kullen stores, the brainchild of ex-Kroger store manager Michel Cullen, were slightly smaller than Big Bear stores but no less successful. When chains were faced with falling prices and profits in early 1930 and 1931, they at first simply closed unprofitable units.
Owners of chain and independent supermarkets came to hope for customers who would be satisfied with a store's amenities and prices, and who would not make personal demands on store personnel. New stores, while not warehouse-sized, were quite large and featured self-serve refrigerated cases, produce departments, as well as miles and miles of canned goods and dry groceries on open shelving. The older chaotic supermarkets were quickly replaced by the ordered supermarket.
Before long, however, they also tried to move away from older price-oriented appeals, both because of the constant danger that chains would hurt themselves with constant below cost price wars, and because public and political support for chains’ sometimes cut-throat price-competition was wearing thin. Instead, chains emphasised the special attention they paid to women and to women’s propriety in their stores. This, of course, was in line with their own sense that women were their most important customers. Kroger stores began hiring professional ‘homemakers’ who demonstrated meals and products in stores and at women's club meetings. A&P began publishing Woman's Day, a magazine distributed free in its stores.
In 1955, the editors of Life magazine published a cover which depicted a woman pushing a happy child in an overflowing shopping cart. Not only had stores grown in size, but the very notion that a woman and a child would be happy and calm shopping in a grocery store was a relatively new one. The term ‘mass luxury’ used as a caption by these editors simply did not describe the very non-luxurious surroundings of many food stores. As the editors knew well, it was the feminised luxury as much as the scale of the new stores that was remarkable. How and where women shopped had changed dramatically over the previous twenty years, a result of the on-going economies of scale and low prices of large stores, but also of government policy and grocers’ desire to build a new gendered order.

Design factors
Skipping ahead 50 years or so, the supermarket, like society had changed. People both affluent and underclassed, male and female, married and single, all have to use the supermarket. Neighbourhoods have become more culturally and ethically integrated, plus there was competition everywhere. One common denominator, however, was time – everyone had less of it. People could get their weekly bread, milk and eggs at the petrol station when they stopped on the way home to fill the car. Sure, it cost a little more, but time was also money, and this saved time. People went to the supermarket once a week for bulk shopping rather every day. What is a retailer to do?
The store layout forms the basis of the store formula. The core concepts are routing, orientation, focus points and product range structure. No matter whether the store has one hundred or ten thousand square metres of floor space, the store layout is the foundation for further developments.
Supermarket aisles have to flow fluidly, with no dead ends, sharp turns, bottlenecks or traffic jams. At the same time, retailers know that shoppers want buying groceries to be a pleasant, relaxing experience with some excitement. Reconciling these two diametric goals, and keeping up their reputation for doing this successfully, as well as giving each customer a unique look, is a challenge. Consider a few of the basic design experience factors. Supermarkets must appear:
• Clean (to help us trust their quality standards).
• Brightly-lit (to make the products look appealing).
• Well-stocked (to suggest good value for money, and convenience).
• Fast: smooth, wide aisles (to help customers feel they are covering our two miles quickly).

These factors must be delivered through a combination of architecture and interior design at every level. Every aspect of a store’s layout – from the produce display near the entrance to the dairy case in the back to the sweets at the register – is designed to stimulate shopping serendipity. There is great complexity within a grocery store’s architecture and point-of-sale design, but also potential for great beauty.

Case study 1 – COOP Italy
There is currently little cooperation and collaboration between CPGs and retailers regarding consumer needs. CPGs share few insights with retailers from the extensive consumer market research they typically conduct in the early phases of a product development cycle. Similarly, following a new product launch, little or no PoS data flows from retailers to CPGs that would shed light on consumer response and product preferences. This lack of interaction helps contribute to high product development costs and failure rates for CPGs. In addition, retailers are sometimes ill-prepared for new product launches and struggle to schedule the stocking of products as promised. 
In 2005, Coop Italy, joined forces with L'Oréal to re-design Coop's cosmetics department. Both companies felt there was a high opportunity for growth in the food channel. The goals were to increase customer satisfaction, shopper frequency, store image and performance. In the period from January to June 2006, Coop's Bologna location had -9.2 per cent turnover in its Health & Beauty department, compared to the same period in 2005. After the ‘makeover’ Coop saw a +2.4 per cent turnover.

Supermarket shopping is increasingly a chore for shoppers. Consumers are therefore reinventing marketing. CPG marketers and their retail partners must evolve and develop breakthrough in-store communications that connect with consumers in meaningful ways. A consumer's need and receptivity are as different as pushing a shopping cart, compared with sitting on the sofa. Replicating the traditional ad message in the retail store is therefore insufficient. A new communications environment demands appropriate messaging.
CPGs continue to look to their retail partners for greater, more real-time information on consumer needs and behaviours.

Case study 2 – Tesco UK
Tesco, the UK's leading retailer, asked Fitch to make their Kensington store more appealing to up-market customers, while keeping is mind that Tesco has a wide range of customers appealing to a diverse demographic base. Fitch was asked to enhance the shopping experience around key fresh food product categories including Fresh Fish and Meat, Deli Offers, In-Store Bakery lines, Premium grocery lines and Fine Wines.


Supermarket of the future
According to studies in Finland, an average household visits shops on average 4.3 times a week spending on average 48 minutes on weekdays and 58 minutes on weekends. A total of 57 per cent of the time is spent in cars and the rest in shops, picking goods and paying for them. Altogether we are looking at a total of some 450 million hours spent to this pick-up activity in Finland. Based on these facts we argue that the downstream operations in the logistics chain of grocery goods, from the shop to the household, are currently very expensive and ineffective from the viewpoint of the consumer.
There are some 4,200 grocery retail outlets in Finland and the number has been decreasing for years. Currently, approximately 400 of the biggest stores and supermarkets account for 50 per cent of the trade. Smaller shops are suffering and a new threat for them is the growing trade volumes of grocery products at petrol stations and kiosks. They can offer more flexible opening hours than grocery stores due to current legislation.
However, in the US, companies building dedicated electronic grocery shopping (EGS) divisions are experiencing huge losses. Peapod reported an operational loss of US$15 million with US$57 million sales volume. Streamline made a US$10 million loss with only US$7 million total revenues. Their expectations are based on estimates claiming that close to 20 per cent of the US$500 billion grocery market is going to become Internet-based in the coming year. Some 60 per cent of adult US citizens do not like grocery shopping and 67 per cent of double income households have a PC.
We are still in the early stages of electronic commerce and the Internet is quite commonly seen only as an electronic communication media to pass customer orders to service providers. As technology and store infrastructures change, more consumers will obtain their groceries via the web, giving supermarkets an even greater challenge. Grocery shopping ‘the old fashioned’ way will become a luxury, with people going for the ‘experience’ rather than for necessity, predicts Simon Threadkell of Fitch, a UK-based design firm.
The outside of the store will become more of a priority, designed to be attractive and inviting, and not just a ‘big box’. Large, glass panels that let in plenty of light help create an inviting entrance to this supermarket. At night, the bright, well-lit entrance, will help the store stand out among others in the area. Parking will be underground, bringing the wares closer to passers-by. Less staff for checkout will be needed, as self-checkout becomes more widespread. Stores will offer more demonstrations at food stations, or other special attractions, such as people making mozzarella in store. We have already seen this trend starting over the last five years in stores such as Central Market and Whole Foods, where the Culinary Coordinator hosts ‘community table’ dinners where shoppers come in, drink some wine and beer, and say what they would like to learn to cook. The patrons accompany the CC down the aisles to collect ingredients, who then whips up a five-course meal.
There will be less emphasis on price, more emphasis on ethical consumption and cooking from scratch. In one sense, the supermarket of the future will resemble the open-air markets of the past.

USEFUL LINKS Jones Food Equipment www.jonesfoodstoreequip.com/ Fitch www.fitch.com Jos de Vries www.josdevries.eu Supermarketdesign.com www.supermarket-design.com Assmann Shop Design www.assmann.at   Wanzl  www.wanzl.com