The best seller lists on Amazon have been described as the most current and readily available information there was, by Margaret Emrick, consumer insight specialist at Nestlé, at the IFT Annual Meeting and Expo in Chicago.
“You can learn a lot about a product in a short amount of time without spending a dime," she told attendees in Chicago in July. “By building a foundational knowledge of a category to gain alignment [you can] move a project along faster.”
The Amazon grocery category is updated hourly, and, when combined with the customer reviews, feedback forums and star reviews, can quickly provide product developers with an idea of the kind of things people are looking for in a product.
“You can see how consumers are really talking about the product you are researching,” said Emrick. “Look at the questions people are asking. People are asking about protein content, palm oil and appetite.”
Using sales data from JeeQ Data LLC, FoodNavigator-USA is able to show which brands are ruling the roost on the different food and beverage categories on Amazon.com.
JeeQ Data is a new company and was founded by former Microsoft and Amazon.com employees.
“With our service, you can track top selling food and drugs, electronics, books, home and kitchen products, clothes, shoes and almost any retail category products with just a few clicks,” explained Kevin Zhang, the founder of JeeQ Data. “The summary report can be categorized by brand, model, manufacturers etc, so you know which brands or models are selling the best in the past week or past month, the price changes history and other top selling trends.”
Beverage
Coffee and water dominate Amazon’s online beverage sales, with the San Francisco Bay Coffee with a bestseller appearance “share” for the past four weeks of 30%, followed by Keurig on 20%, Nestlé Pure Life with 10%, smartwater with 9%, Nespresso with 8.4%. All of the data presented here is for the four week period Sept 11, 2015 to Oct 11, 2015.
Breakfast
The breakfast foods category on Amazon.com includes cereal bars, energy & nutritional bars, granola & trail mix, cold cereal, granola, grits, muesli, oatmeal, and instant breakfast drinks. Taking all of these together, the figure below shows that KIND is the most prevalent bestselling brand, with a bestseller appearance “share” for the past four weeks of almost 55%. Among the specific bestselling products are KIND Nuts & Spices, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt (1.4 Ounce, 12 Count); KIND PLUS, Peanut Butter Dark Chocolate + Protein, Gluten Free Bars (1.4 Ounce, 12 Count); and KIND Fruit & Nut, Almond & Coconut, All Natural, 1.4-Ounce Gluten Free Bars (pack of 12). Next up are Pop Tarts, Rice Krispies, and Clif Bar.
Candy & chocolate
This is a much more diverse category, with no single brand dominating. Haribo, Skittles, Jolly Rancher, Hershey’s and Life Savers all have similar bestseller appearance shares for the past four weeks. Multiple other brands have also spent time in the top 10 bestselling list, with 17 brands in total represented.
Snacks
KIND makes a return to the top spot on the podium, with a bestseller appearance share for the past four weeks of almost 45%. Sunshine and its Cheez-its come in a distant second with about 10%.
