As you can imagine, we receive hundreds of new food and beverage products to taste and evaluate every month. What I will never understand is why the vast majority of them are unsuccessful. According to a new study from The Nielsen Company, there were more than 122,000 new items introduced by manufacturers last year, and yet only 3,701 of them, or three percent, managed to achieve more than a million dollars a year in sales; just 206 of them, or 0.2 percent, generated more than $10 million in sales; and 10 of them, or .01 percent, managed to ring up more than $50 million in sales.

The fact is that new products in total did manage to generate in excess of $20 billion in sales during 2007, with food and beverage items bringing in more than $9.2 billion in sales, general merchandise generating in excess of $4.2 billion, health and beauty items generating more than $3.4 billion and nonfood/grocery bringing in more than $3.2 billion in sales.

During 2007, the categories with the most new items were cosmetics and candy, each with close to 5,000 new products available for store shelves; the categories most driven by new items, generating the highest amount of new market share, were women’s fragrances (with 32.1 percent of its category) and men’s toiletries (with 26.8 percent of its category).

Nielsen notes that shorter life-cycle categories such as fragrances tend to be new-product-driven, in part because they are fueled by heavy levels of co-branding and celebrity licensing which capitalize on trends; high turn, variety-driven categories like snacks and cereal, which often see high levels of new product activity, are geared to satisfy consumer needs for something different.

On the other hand, the categories with the least new item impact were flour, frozen juices and drinks (each with new products generating just 0.1 percent of their categories), canned seafood and fresh eggs (with 0.2 percent of category share apiece), and ice (ice? …yup! Amazingly enough, new ice products actually generated 0.3 percent of its category share).

Still, the release of new products is a near universal phenomenon – with 104 of the 105 categories reported by Nielsen having new product introductions last year. Wondering which was the one category with no new products introductions? That would be refrigerated yeast.

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• New Product Reviews
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