Many food retailers are currently investing more heavily in ready-prepared food offerings when designing and remodelling their shops, including offerings of hot snacks, refrigerated shelving for a range of convenience foods, a restaurant area, and hot and cold counters. These complement the shopping environment perfectly and offer retailers a lucrative opportunity to increase the frequency and duration of store visits, thus improving customers’ shopping experience and boosting sales. The local supermarket has become a meeting place for friends and colleagues who also want to enjoy a culinary experience.
As the retail trade and ready-prepared food sector are becoming increasingly integrated, so too are the individual departments in supermarkets. In this context, at Euroshop, Austrian refrigeration technology experts from HAUSER are exhibiting a new VITHEA Gastro Module for supermarkets, which is designed to allow for customised approaches. This marks the start of a new direction in store design and future shopping experiences.
Hot snacks, which can be freshly prepared in store or in the bistro area, are particularly on trend at the moment, especially in combination with chilled snacks and drinks. Little wonder, in our fast-paced world where eating on the go is becoming more and more prevalent. For retailers, positioning hot and chilled snacks together brings in additional sales, and when hot slices of pizza are right next to the chilled drinks, for example, it saves the customer time and makes shopping more convenient.
Part of the HAUSER RENIMA family of products, the RENIMA Hot-Combi provides a modern solution for positioning hot and cold snacks in a way that is visually coherent. It can also be integrated into an existing store design quickly and easily, requires little space, and the low height allows good visibility across the store. The hot area, which has high-quality, easy-to-clean surfaces, offers different temperature levels and keeps food warm at a stable temperature without the need for a bain-marie. The unit can be combined perfectly with RENIMA refrigeration cabinets for chilled snacks.
For warm, counter-service dishes combined with refrigeration, the VITHEA Gastro Module can be perfectly supplemented with the matching VITHEA self-service refrigerated counter. Other modules from the VITHEA range will also be presented at Euroshop 2020 in February, including a special module for fish and a transformer module that can be converted from a serving counter into a self-service counter without any special tools.
It’s not just hot and cold snacks that work well when positioned next to one another. At Euroshop, HAUSER is also following the trend for deep-freeze cabinets combined with refrigeration. The positioning of frozen and chilled fruit and vegetables together is especially popular with consumers. Fresh fruit and vegetables are in demand: they are healthy, high in fibre and contain lots of vitamins and minerals. However, these products aren’t as appealing when frozen and are seen as less fresh. Yet research shows that quite the opposite is true: fruit and vegetables that are frozen immediately after being harvested contain more vitamins than the fruit and vegetables found in the non-chilled section of the supermarket. Eating frozen vegetables brings many benefits, and placing them alongside non-chilled fruit and vegetables in the supermarket fits with consumer shopping habits and boosts sales.
Customers often perceive the frozen sections in supermarkets as less inviting, due to their cold temperatures and sterile presentation of products. But things don’t have to stay that way. At Euroshop, HAUSER is exhibiting some examples of a premium look for deep-freeze cabinets using a new mix of materials and a new design that can dramatically improve the ambience in sub-zero sections.
For presentation, the motto is “back to nature”. With visual elements in in wood finish and transparent all-glass doors, deep-freeze units fit in perfectly with new supermarket design trends. To demonstrate this at Euroshop, HAUSER will be exhibiting coordinated combinations of deep-freeze and normal refrigeration units, such as the REMETA refrigerated multideck display cabinet with a MIRENGO deep-freeze cabinet in a gondola arrangement. This positioning combined with normal refrigeration units enhances the look of both – and the customer can find chilled and frozen products in one place.
Chilled, impulse-buy islands in the checkout area have become a firm element in modern retail concepts. The checkout zone is generally the area with the highest space productivity in a shop. Short refrigeration units, such as the VINIA or VARIANDO series, enable shoppers to focus quickly due to their low height and function as “fresh islands” for chilled drinks or delicious filled baked goods and other snacks to go. Highly transparent refrigeration units with good-quality, conservative design allow shoppers to focus on the fresh food.
HAUSER is particularly concerned with meeting clients’ individual wishes and requirements. This applies equally to our refrigeration and deep-freeze units. The HAUSER modular system, comprising different optional features and variants, lets us assemble the perfect, individually tailored counter for each client. The refrigeration and deep-freeze cabinets can be combined with one another and customised with a variety of optional features and colours, and adapted to the individual store concept.
