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Introduction
We are now in the twenty-first century, and many readers may ask the question of how is knowing the history of food marketing helpful to today’s contemporary food marketers. Winston Churchill once said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” and “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Understanding the history of food retailing can give the twenty-first century food marketer insights by drawing on what was successful as well as what went wrong. The concept of a postmortem of what was done in the past is neither an indictment of how we behaved in the past nor is it a celebration on how things were better years ago. It is simply a body of knowledge that helps make us more efficient and effective today.
An issue that needs to be resolved is how far back we should go. We know that the concept of food retailing has been around for 1,000 years or more. Ancient markets and agoras have been in place since recorded time. Food was one of the most basic commodities traded or sold in these markets. While interesting, this probably provides little information in terms of helping us understand food retailing today. Although in a later section of this paper, local farmer’s markets and wet markets in developing countries will be mentioned.
When one examines the past, it can often be broken down into specific eras. But it is important to point out that there is generally not a discrete delineation between when one era ends and the other begins. In each of the eras discussed below, there were clearly times when both types of food retailing existed. It is just that one was fading and the other was blooming.
Methodology
The methodology conforms to a historical review of the development of a process. In this case, it is the development of the grocery/supermarket channel. A secondary research process was employed using both academic, trade and Lay publications. The historic review also includes the personal observations of an academic researcher with 50 years of study and observation of the retail food industry. The author having written over 100 peer review articles mostly using experimental and survey data recognizes...