The average supermarket carries about 45,000 different items according to the Food Marketing Institute. That’s nearly 1 different item for every square foot of space. You may wonder how people decide what to buy during a trip to the grocery.

Actually, it’s carefully orchestrated marketing that largely affects what consumers “decide” to buy. Some of the most important marketing tools include:

• End Caps: Display spaces at the end of aisles
• Features & Displays: Signs featuring promotional pricing, new items, etc.
• Shelf Space: Eye-level space generates higher sales than those stuck at the top or bottom
• Front End: Impulse-inducing items like candy and magazines are placed near checkout
• Promotions: These include coupons, flyers, newspaper inserts and other promotional tools
• Brand Marketing: Think Coca-Cola’s cute polar bears

Larger consumer food companies employ small armies of sharp MBAs and ad agencies to push and pull these various marketing levers in order to get you to buy their products.

We think that marketing, at its essence, should always work to make people feel good about the products and services they buy. There is value in many of the traditional marketing tools—those Coca-Cola polar bears really are adorable—but huge budgets are needed to fuel this kind of marketing. This leaves the producer of the small-batch, hand-crafted cola struggling to get noticed among the 44,999 other products (if they even get distribution at the supermarket).

Yet, some of our favorite food discoveries came when we heard from a friend about a cheese from a small Wisconsin farm we just “have to try” or read an article about a chocolate maker who goes to the ends of the earth to find the absolute best cacao beans for her chocolate bars.

One of our goals at Foodoro is to build marketing “tools” that help folks discover the lesser-known gems.