Nutri Blendz Smoothie Article:
RTD's "The Good Ole Days!"
by RonnieB
In the beginning
("The Arnold Era") the public said that health clubs and gyms were just a fad. Here we are 25 years later and the Health Club
industry is still booming. It wasn't long after the inception of the first health club that supplement manufacturers (mainly Weider in these early days)
began to realize that Gyms were the front line in a battle to educate consumers. This of course is still the case today, but you wouldn't know it by watching the
treatment gyms receive from the manufacturers of supplement lines.
During the mid to late 80's a few guys started making the RTD drinks, I can't remember who started it and when, but it seems to me ABB drinks and Science Foods came first then others followed. I don't remember all the facts, but the one thing I do remember was we all were making a small fortune on these drinks. Even the smallest of Gyms would sell through a few thousand dollars per month on these RTD's and the margins were out of this world by today's standard. We all remember those "Good Ole Days". We started selling tons of Sports drinks and protein bars at the front desk and before you knew it we had specialized supplement lines (like Apex) that we could use to educate the end user and create a buyer for life.
Now flash forward a decade or two. The year is 2006 and you sell a handful of RTD drinks, maybe some protein
powders or creatine and you get and "earful" from customers complaining about
your pricing and how they can get it cheaper online or down the street! What happened? It went from profitable to not even worth stocking.
You know what I mean. You have RTD drinks in your cooler (you probably paid some outrageous shipping fee on
top of ever increasing prices) your bars on the counter have dust and they are probably expired, and Apex is for sale online and in some grocery stores and
every time you teach a new gym patron how to use any of these products they come back the next day and tell you they found it online for a better price.
You did all the work of educating the consumer and someone else gets the "Pay Day"!
This unfortunate turn of events created a huge opening for smoothie bars. Gyms have the opportunity once again to sell products at a reasonable retail price with a huge profit margin! Best of all, they taste great and your potential market is actually larger than with the original RTD drinks and bars put together. Sounds to good to be true? It gets better. Not only do you have huge margins on smoothies, but guess what? Your local supermarket isn't going to be selling them to your members. You don't have any members buying a case of smoothies online (for half price) and bringing them to the gym when they workout.
So the moral of the story is: When you educate your clientele and teach them to use products, who are you teaching them for? In the
case of Apex, many of you busted your hump getting clientele into the Apex
program and now they can buy Apex online and you don't see a dime of those sales. When you taught your clientele to Drink a Pure Protein RTD they left the
Gym and bought it at the local supermarket because "You charge too much". Then when you taught a member to use a Protein Bar as a meal replacement
they ordered a case online and even got free shipping. You can't compete with that. No gym can. So what do we
do?
Smoothie Juice bars generate huge sales revenues with large profit margins and offer great exclusivity. So from now on when you are going to educate a gym patron, teach them to use something they will come back to you for and not find it cheaper elsewhere.
