I am writing an article about marketing to baby boomers and would like to know if any of you do anything in particular to market your 50-69 year old patrons?
You bet!
I do an entire presentation on that very topic. Here’s the skinny:
Ditch the dried herbs in the sauce and on the pizza, instead go with fresh, green leaf basil and maybe oregano. This takes the heartburn out of the pizza.
Think healthy. Offer a wheat crust or multi-grain crust.
Cheese can be an issue due to the cholesterol content, so offer a healthy cheese blend consisting of 50% premium mozzarella cheese and 50% tofu cheese product (Galaxy Nutritional Foods has a pretty decent one). This will give the cheese blend a full 50% reduction in cholesterol content.
Think sodium reduction by reducing the salt added to the sauce, and dough. Cut the amount of salt added to both by 50%.
Offer “healthy” topping alternatives such as poultry pepperoni, or bison pepperoni, chicken also makes for a great topping. Maybe even think about a fish/shrimp topping too (Omega-3).
Roll all of these together into a great pizza based on a wheat or multi-grain crust, with slices of fresh tomato for the sauce, using only diced garlic and fresh basil for flavoring, then add the above mentioned cheese blend along with a selection of fresh vegetable toppings. If the customer wants meat on their pizza, offer chicken, or one of the mentioned pepperoni products, or even fish. Top it off with a very light drizzle of olive oil.
Give that pizza a consumer friendly name like “heart healthy pizza” or “dieter’s delight”.
Be sure to describe the pizza on your menu or on table tents using key words such as made with a special cheese blend that is 50% lower in cholesterol than our regular cheese, Made on a wonderful tasting multi-grain crust with whole-grain goodness. Made with low fat poultry/bison pepperoni, etc.
There are a whole bunch of other things that you can do to draw this crowd into your store too, including the use of hand rails where you might have steps, improved store lighting, and if needed, appearance upgrades to the interior and exterior of your store.
I could go on and on, but I think you see the picture I’m painting here.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
