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/838473
q&a What trends do you see happening in the specialty category, and how are they affecting your stores? There has been a proliferation of specialty foods in all kinds of retail- ers, from Costco to the regular grocery stores in town, and it makes our job even harder to stay ahead of the trends. That's why we love dealing with small, mom-and-pop manufacturers, because they couldn't supply 100 stores, even if they wanted to. Some of them get bigger and eventually want to [supply larger chains], but then they may not be special to us any more. We may still keep them if they sell well, but if there's not a real point of dif- ference, we will discontinue those and make room for someone else. How do you approach product curation? We always have two purposes. One is to go deeper, face-to-face, with the relationships we already have with the vendors. The second purpose is—since we know what categories are doing well overall in specialty, and we also know what's doing well in our world—we look for items in those categories that are really doing great. We have to be selective. In some categories, such as jams and preserves, there are phenomenal producers from all over the country, but we can't carry eight or nine varieties of seedless red raspberry preserves. We don't have a specific list of products we are looking for. We are looking for anything, as long as we can turn it, which is good for them and good for us. What are the attributes that are important? Do clean labels and short ingredient lists matter? Certainly, having ingredients you can pronounce is important, but I think taste is our number-one factor. If it has a clean label, all the better. We really focus on setting new items up to succeed—if it is a raspberry jam, and the first ingredient is sugar, maybe we will not bring that one in. But if there's another that is equally good-tasting, and the first ingredient is actually raspberries, maybe we will bring that one in. But it has to be good-tasting. As we walk the Fancy Food Show, we are looking for those smaller producers, making quality stuff, in a category that we can sell really well here in St. Louis, and it may be a couple of years before the big guys actually get them in their stores. How important is local sourcing for specialty foods at Straub's? We love to mentor the younger, local, small folk—someone who has their grandma's recipe for a salsa, for example. We give a lot of shelf space to folks like that. Some of them will succeed and sell well, and I might put them in touch with the Specialty Food Association if they want to grow. We are always open to helping them with things like packaging. We have category specialists who enjoy doing that—helping somebody get off the ground. That's important to us at Straub's. How do you decide on the balance of specialty versus traditional items in your stores? Our selection has to be curated because our square footage is in the 10,000-square-foot range, not the 70,000-square-foot range. It's more about what sells in our world. We have ice cream and we have frozen pizza—so how can we make our frozen department different from the other guy's down the street? We go out and find some of those small-batch ice cream producers that are making some really good stuff, and bring them into our stores. For the pizza, we'll look for other local providers, whether they are restaurants or someone who makes a high-quality, local frozen pizza, and we'll jump on that. In the beverage category, Coke, Pepsi, and 7-up are everywhere, so we might look for root beers in glass bottles, and we might have 80 of them. They are not going to have that down the street. We carry all kinds of nostalgic bottled sodas that create a little differ- ence in the beverage category. Do you cater to millennials in your stores, and if so, what are they looking for? I don't think we cater specifically to them. Those millennials who are educated and have a little bit of disposable income like to experiment, and they will come into our stores, but we probably benefit more on the prepared food side than in the shelf-stable specialty arena. But we will also get some of those who love to cook. Some of them are buying specialty ingredients that they can use to prepare at home, which is always fun to see. Mark Hamstra is a freelance writer based in New York. "We have to be selective. In some categories, such as jams and preserves, there are phenomenal producers from all over the country, but we can't carry eight or nine varieties of seedless red raspberry preserves." 166 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE specialtyfood.com