New to supermarket shelves are St Mary’s Breadfruit chips. The snack product, which joins the line of chips made by the company, has been available to consumers since last month. “This product is 100 per cent Jamaican… it’s an all-natural product, and the chips are whole or partial slices of breadfruit that are lightly salted,” explained Camille Fender, sales and marketing coordinator at JP Tropical Foods. “People love that it has a very real breadfruit taste and the brightly coloured packaging.”

St Mary’s, which has nine products on the market including banana, green plantain, sweet plantain, cassava, and sweet potato chips, is marketed by JP Tropical Foods, the country’s largest producer and distributor of green and ripe bananas. The breadfruit chips retail for $80 and are available at a range of supermarkets and outlets islandwide.

Interactive Shopping: a step towards the future

Thursday Food spotted an interesting addition to supermarket shelves on a recent visit to MegaMart, Waterloo Road. As we browsed the aisles for tasty local eats, an unusual sound caught our attention. It took a few seconds to locate the source, which was a colourful, GraceKennedy-branded device playing a series of advertisements and announcements.

The company attached the medium-sized interactive digital screen to a shelf displaying their products in order to engage consumers, heighten their awareness of the products, and encourage them to try the goods.

David Reid, senior brand manager at GraceKennedy, informed Thursday Food that the screens were implemented last June in a number of supermarkets. He also explained that both consumer and storeowner responses have been “very positive”, with consumers lauding GraceKennedy’s innovativeness and proprietors indicating that the device “raises the profile of the category” and the shopping experience by extension. Indeed, given the increased use of technology around the world, this is a step towards the future. And according to Reid, storeowners have already seen a significant increase in sales and general product awareness in the participating outlets. Screens have been set up at the following locations: MegaMart, Waterloo Road; Empire Supermarket, Liguanea; Shopper’s Fair in the Portmore Mall; Loshusan and Shopper’s Fair supermarkets in Barbican; Lee’s Food Fair; Red Hills Road; Joong Supermarkets and Hi Lo outlets in Manor Park, Fairview Mall (MoBay), and Barbican.