Food shoppers trading down on expensive items like soda, snacks

SEATTLE — Julie Gleason walks past the artisan bread section at Top Food & Drug in Shoreline, Wash., wistfully remembering a time when her family could afford a good rosemary bread.

"Now, it's usually a double-loaf pack of wheat bread from Costco that costs about $3.50," she said. "With artisan bread, the next day it starts getting stale and you can't make sandwiches out of it."

Gleason also stopped buying soda pop, chips and cookies after her husband, Schy, was laid off last summer. She's cut her grocery bill almost in half, to about $400 a month for a family of five, including two teenagers and her mother.

Restaurant visits are out unless it's a birthday. Her new shopping and eating habits reflect the cost-cutting moves of a country well into its second year of recession.

It's not a return to the ketchup sandwiches that some survivors of the Great Depression remember, but it's a drastic change in behavior that reaches from kitchen counters to corporate profits.

Sales have stagnated at some of the country's biggest food stores, including Costco Wholesale; Safeway; Supervalu, which runs Albertsons; and Kroger, which operates Fred Meyer and QFC.

"People are trading down," said Joe Cohen, owner of Ralph's Grocery & Deli in downtown Seattle, which was remodeled this summer despite the recession.

After years of indulging every culinary whim, from extravagantly priced salt to vitamin-fortified dog water, unemployed and economically wary shoppers have turned to gardening, baking and Hamburger Helper.

Official numbers aren't available for each food category, but the trend toward value has supermarket executives scrambling to offer the next great deal.

Metropolitan Market took a chance by carrying some primrose plants earlier this year when sales of cut flowers dropped.

They sold out so quickly that the six-store chain added bulbs, planters and other gardening products. "It's more than compensated for the floral business being down," said Brad Halverson, vice president of marketing.

Flour and sugar sales are growing faster than most other categories at Bellingham-based Haggen, which runs 33 Haggen and Top Food stores in the Pacific Northwest.

And store brands, which are cheaper than big-name brands, have taken off. They now account for one in five items sold by U.S. supermarkets, drug chains and mass merchandisers, according to the Private Label Manufacturers Association.