The Value of Variety

I learned the other day that you can get Procter & Gamble's Bounce fabric softener sheets in any one of five "scent levels," from unscented "Level 0" to, I presume, gag-inducing Level 4. But the variations don't stop there. There is Bounce with Febreze, Bounce Pure Essentials, and a new product called Bounce Awakenings.

Even if you limit yourself to the five scent levels of Original Bounce, you have several scents to choose from: Fresh Linen, Fresh Lavender, Outdoor Fresh, and Spring Fresh. And they come in 10 different package sizes, from 25-count to 250-count, the latter of which is available for people who just wouldn't be satisfied with the 240-count box.

The food industry is no different from the consumer-product industry in offering endless variations. Both businesses have for decades thrived on introductions of new products. That's why you see so many people standing in the aisle, near-catatonic as they attempt to choose from among dozens of varieties of salad dressing or breakfast cereal.

Has this trend finally hit a wall? Maybe, says Emily Fredrix of the Associated Press.

Fredrix found that, in response to the recession, food companies are starting to cut back on their offerings and to channel more resources toward big sellers and higher-margin products.

H.J. Heinz, for example, has instituted a policy of pulling two products for every new one it introduced. Sara Lee is cutting its product menu by 8 percent this year.

"It's all shaping up to mean fewer choices for consumers," Fredrix writes.

In just the past 10 years, according to Bain & Co., the number of products on grocery shelves has grown by 50 percent. The growth comes not only from wholly new products, but from variations on size, ingredients, flavors and formulas.

The food industry's unique economics have driven this trend. Demand for calories is naturally limited to the number of human stomachs there are to fill. So food marketers are always looking to differentiate themselves by offering new variations.

That will still be true once the recession is over. Food companies may be retrenching now as consumers shop more carefully and hunt bargains, and as the industry hoards more cash. But that will change once things turn around and companies go back to chasing market share.

And it's not as if food companies have abandoned new offerings, even now. Kraft has discontinued Hand-Snacks pudding and Kool-Aid gels, but it has introduced new flavors of Jell-O pudding. Even before that, there were so many variations of Jell-O that Kraft offered a Flash-powered "Flavor Finder" on its Web site. If you move the slider to "strawberry" and click on "see all products," you find that there are 14 different Jell-O variations that come in that flavor.