Checking Out: Steve Calhoun

Steve Calhoun
This veteran store designer is now Senior Manager, Retail Design and Experience for The Hershey Company, designing customer experiences for the front of store, seasonal section and the candy aisle.

Am I speaking to the chocolate man?
[laughs] Actually at Hershey, we do far more than chocolates. Our brands also include sweets, sours, gummies, and salty snacks, as well as holiday-specific items. For example, we recently launched a new line of Shaq-A-Licious XL Gummies with Shaquille O’Neal.

And your part in all of this is what. . .?
My elevator explanation for what I do for a living is, ‘I design stores.’ I work with all our partners on their retail design plans: better placement of fixtures and solving any problems either Hershey or our partners might be experiencing. And I bring my store design background to the job, starting with the front of store and the confectionery sections of the stores’ aisles.

What we have generally called p-o-p.
Yes, exactly. We use customer research and sales data to explain to retailers what makes the most sense for their confectionery aisles. Fixtures, shelf levels, shelf heights, linear placement of products, adjacencies, end-caps – how to make the most compelling product presentation, not only in the candy aisle but wherever you find our category of products.

PHOTO: THE HERSHEY COMPANY

Share the Wealth

I imagine Hershey’s is the thousand-pound elephant in terms of maximizing its shelf space and prominence.

Actually, our retail clients want to drive their entire confectionery sales. Our best solutions involve helping all the brands succeed. Our first objective is to drive activity up and down the aisle.

My department operates within the Category Management division. That means helping figure out the entire category marketplace. So better fixtures and signage and solving other problems works for everybody. If overall sales of hard candy and soft candy and chocolate and gummies and mints and pretzels and snacks do well, we’re confident we’ll get our share.

Only the store aisles?
We have two separate business models. The first is selling in the aisles, which is more purposeful. Shoppers go to those aisles intentionally, to buy something. The second model is for the shelves at the checkout area, which are almost entirely impulsive. All shoppers linger there while unloading their carts near candies, mints and gum. You’re standing there, the items are at easy eye-level and within reach, and they’re not expensive. It’s been a huge growth opportunity for our retail partners. Few people go to the store specifically to buy gum.

That might be changing, though.
Yes! My biggest new challenge is understanding where the future is headed, in both technology and innovation. An example is Amazon’s Just Walk-Out technology. It will change the rules of checking out of a store. If the shoppers scan their app or use a card when they enter the store, linking to their Amazon accounts, there will no longer be any stopping and lingering on the way out. How will we have to adapt our strategies to systems like that?

And yet, in some areas, the rate of technology expansion seems to have slowed down.
Many shoppers do not like change and view the technology as complicated, unfamiliar, or uncomfortable. And all the cameras and sensors in the stores worry them. Personal identity security has become a real concern. But technology is critical to our business. Being able to see what works and doesn’t work, how people navigate the store, how they react to technology and screens – that’s really vital information for our retail partners and us. Customers do opt-in to use the technology though.