are consumers trading down or just trading places between branded and private label baked goods?
In a slowing economy, conventional wisdom states that consumers tend to trade down. In the foodservice channel, they go from fine dining to casual dining. At the retail level, conventional wisdom says consumers trade down from higher-priced branded to lower priced products. Or, they buy larger-sized packages to get a volume discount and more bang for their bucks. However, these times are anything but conventional. For each trend, there’s a countertrend. For each rule, there’s an exception. So just when some data indicates that consumers are trading down to lower priced products, up rises some other data that indicate that consumers aren’t exactly doing that. Just take a snapshot of the wholesale baking industry, and the picture is anything but…
