FEATURED PRODUCTS:
FEATURED PRODUCTS:
EDITOR’S PICK:
Stonewall Kitchen
Tortuga Rum Cake
Rub with Love
SEE PAGE 30
SEE PAGE 24
SEE PAGE 33
GOURMET NEWS
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T H E
VOLUME 86, NUMBER 1 JANUARY 2021 n $7.00
NEWS & NOTES n
Powering Ethnic Diversity in the CPG Space PAGE 6
SUPPLIER NEWS n
A Spicy Sauce with a Side of History PAGE 14
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Rumiano Cheese Breaks Ground on New Facility PAGE 36
NATURALLY HEALTHY n
Perfect Indulgence from Graeter’s Ice Cream PAGE 20
B U S I N E S S
N E W S P A P E R
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Breakfast is Back PAGE 34
News..............................................6 Ad Index .......................................36
www.gourmetnews.com
T H E
G O U R M E T
I N D U S T R Y
Serving the Soups, Rethinking Community and Hoping the Salad Bar Returns BY LORRIE BAUMANN
This time last year, the Shemirani family was planning the April grand opening of its ninth Barons Market store in Otay Ranch, a neighborhood in San Diego, California. The beautiful new 21,000 square-foot store was going to have all the elements of a customer experience on which Barons prided itself in its other stores – a hugely popular salad bar, a wide variety of hot foods and sandwiches and a hot soup bar so popular that Rachel Shemirani
used to joke that the company could change its name to Barons
Market Soups. She’s a Senior Vice President of Barons Market and daughter of co-Founder Joe Shemirani, who
opened the Barons Market in San Diego’s Point Loma neighborhood along with his brothers in 1993. There’s a little less joking about hot soup now, but Barons Market continues to thrive by listening carefully to customers and responding quickly to their needs and concerns. Independent grocers are better equipped than huge grocery chains to exercise that kind of flexibility as the pandemic continues to introduce uncertainties into the business climate, Shemirani said. “The whole key is to stay flexible. I imagine this as stretching us,” she
Numerous consumer studies have found that COVID-19 has changed grocery shopping behavior, and many of these trends are expected to outlast the pandemic. Shoppers have gone back to traditional supermarkets where they feel a loyalty and that can supply a broad range of their needs. They’re not making as many casual trips to grocery stores – gone are the days when they’d visit a grocery store just to
check it out or to buy a singular item that’s on special. In general, they’ve become more efficient shoppers – they arrive with a list and a plan. They’re shopping less often and buying more on a single trip, so they don’t have to come back to the store more often than necessary. Acosta, a sales and marketing agency in the consumer packaged goods industry, found in a July 2020 report that 37 percent of shoppers are spending more on
Consumer Demand Speeds Online Business BY LORRIE BAUMANN
each grocery trip now than they did pre-pandemic, Shopping once a week or more has declined 20 percent from 67 percent of shoppers to 47 percent. Twenty-seven percent of shoppers reported that they were going to the grocery store only two to three times per month, and 26 percent said they were going once a month or less. Half of them are spending more on groceries now than they did
March of 2020 might be remembered among grocers, once COVID-19 is just a memory, as the year that e-commerce went from being something that Amazon and big grocery chains did because they could to a must-do for any grocer intending to thrive through the 21st century. Mercato’s Chief Executive Officer, Bobby Brannigan, is congratulating himself and his team for having developed a platform that helped make that rapid transformation a reality. “Pre-COVID, e-commerce was nice to have, but it became an essential right away. It was amazing for us to be able to be there for them, because our mission is to help independent grocers succeed,” he said. “In March, we had people calling and saying, ‘Hey, can you get me online right away?’ and we were taking people online in 24 hours.” Brannigan built the Mercato platform in 2015 after searching for a way to help his father, the Proprietor of B & A Pork Store, an Italian grocery in Brooklyn, New York, add an online component to his brick and mortar business. The Mercato platform
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Pandemic-Driven Shopper Behavior Demands Clear Messaging BY LORRIE BAUMANN
PHOTO FEATURE
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Saffron Road Heats up the Freezer Aisle BY LORRIE BAUMANN
When the COVID-19 pandemic created a wave of panic-buying in the nation’s grocery stores, Saffron Road was ready. Looking ahead to a future after the pandemic has subsided, Saffron Road Chief Executive Officer Adnan Durrani expects to continue building on the growth that the company achieved in 2020 with the same foresight that he brought to 2019. “Freezer sales broke all records this year. A lot of Americans now have an extra freezer in their garage,” he observed. “They’re not going to be selling those freezers on eBay on
January 1. A mega-shift in consumers’ acceptance and affinity for frozen foods as a staple kitchen must-have is the new normal.... Those freezers are there to stay.” Consumers have realized that consumers can get the same 12 to 18 months of shelf life in a frozen product that they can buy in a can, and Durrani thinks that Americans are likely to continue choosing to operate their households with pantries that are more fully stocked than they were before the pandemic forced consumers to learn more about the grocery supply chain than they’d felt the need to know before.
Durrani defines Saffron Road as a meals company that’s based on global cuisines and culinary excellence. “We, serendipitously, benefited from everything going on during COVID,” he said, noting that grocery sales from the center store did well in general during the pandemic, and frozen foods did particularly well. “That’s one of the reasons that we’ve done so well by continuing our mission of providing healthier entrees for Americans now very discerning about their health during a global pandemic.” Saffron Road kept what Durrani calls a “die-hard commitment” to
fulfill more than 98 percent of the product volume that the company had promised to deliver even as grocers and their shoppers were faced with huge voids on the shelves during the panic-buying phase of the pandemic. “Back in January 2020, because of what was going on in Wuhan while – we didn’t have any idea what was going to happen in January – we took a calculated risk and doubled or tripled our inventory to ensure supply chains were flush,” he said. “We put aside a significant amount of cash flow to produce Continued on PAGE 21