Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/110595
Joe Bellavance of Average Joe Artisan Bread Kit found himself fervently seeking out the ideal bread recipe, spending years attempting the process, after getting a taste of what he saw as the perfect loaf in Maine. "Either I got no crust or I got shoe leather," he recalls of his experimentation. When he finally achieved that ideal combination of chewy bread and a brown, crusty exterior, his friends urged him to sell it—a path he didn't find appealing. A friend in the foodservice industry then suggested creating a kit, and the idea stuck. A wave of panic sparked the idea for Elizabeth Jean's Apple Pie Kit. Hours before hosting a going-away party for her militaryenlisted nephew, her husband suggested she offer her beloved homemade apple pie. In the last-minute decision she rushed to pick up ingredients, "and as I was leaving the grocery store parking lot, really out of desperation, I thought, my goodness, I just wish this was all done and all I had to do was go home and put it together." She wondered if this would be desirable to others and ultimately found encouragement in an unexpected place: precut foods in the produce aisle. "If sliced apples are available," she recalls thinking, "we can probably do this." Each of these products met an existing demand—in many cases, demands that are still relatively new to the industry. The Creative Process While encompassing many food segments, products in the DIY kit category are founded on a unifying goal: clarity and simplicity. "People want to connect with stuff—it just has to be easy," explains Back to the Roots' Arora. The ingredients can often be the easiest component to craft, while elements such as presentation, design and instructions play a significant role in creating a winning kit. Arora and Velez saw their lack of food-oriented backgrounds as an advantage in appealing to the average consumer. "Alex WATCH HOW and I were both coming at IT'S DONE these products as if we're not Specialty Food Magazine's foodies and designing them associate editor Eva Meszaros tests out several of the kits for people who are like us, who mentioned in this feature. To don't know much about food watch step-by-step slideshows, and didn't grow their own go to specialtyfood.com/ food or cook before." The first onlinehighlights. few iterations of the mushroom kit were hardly aesthetic masterpieces, appealing only to a core group of eco-conscious crowds at Berkeley, Calif., farmers markets. When they redesigned the package on the advice of a Whole Foods buyer, the retailer quickly picked it up. With a recipe several years in the making, Bellavance wanted as easy a process as possible for his bread kit. "I had streamlined it and stripped it down to its barest bones; there was nothing I couldn't remove from the process," he says. "And consequently, it requires a minimum number of steps, minimal hands-on time, and the results are pretty fantastic." He established a line of kits, from the Gift Basket Edition, with the full kit-and-kaboodle including kitchen tools, to the Cook's Edition that comprises just the ingredients and specialized tools. The duo behind the Brooklyn Brew Shop Beer Making Kit took inspiration from the food world in simplifying the brewing process. "There wasn't anything on the market that looked at brewing as if it were cooking," Shea and Valand write. "We focused on the idea that beer is food, and we tried to simplify the process without dumbing it down." don't think these kits are going to replace people actually going to the store and buying cheese. But it's something fun to do and say, 'Look, I made my own cheese.'"— "I Tasia Malakasis, Fromagerie Belle Chevre MARCH 2013 45