Why are new product introductions so costly?
About 100,000 grocery products are available on the market. The typical supermarket has space for only 30,000 to 40,000 products, and the failure rate for new products is as high as 80 percent. With so many items competing for so little shelf space, new product introductions have become a high-cost, high-risk proposition. As many as 24 steps are needed to introduce a new item and another 10 to remove the one that occupied the space, according to a Deloitte & Touche study (Managing the Process of Introducing and Deleting Products in the Grocery and Drug Industry, 1990).
