Gourmet News

Boulder Organic! Souping It Up in Colorado

Published August 19, 2016

By Lorrie Baumann

Boulder Organic Foods is a fast-growing maker of fresh soups that are sold out of grocers’ refrigerated cases. “We started here locally in Boulder [Colorado] in a handful of stores, and today we’re in more than 2,000 stores nationwide in pretty much every major market in the country,” said CEO Greg Powers. “We are a dedicated organic, gluten free and non-GMO company. Everything we produce reflects those three attributes.”

The company was started just seven years ago by Kate Brown, a single mom who was looking for healthier fresh soup options. She made several shopping trips to local stores looking for a gluten-free soup brand that would meet her own dietary needs and that would also meet her goals for the food she wanted to give her daughter. When she didn’t find any, she decided to make her own.

Boulder Organic Green Chile Corn Chowder After she began serving her soups to friends and family, one of those friends referred her products to the local Whole Foods store, which asked her to make the soup for sale there. At that point, she put together a business plan and spent a year or two coming up with recipes for commercial quantities of her soups and launched her new food business in early 2009. Powers joined the company several months later. “I joined her having a background in business, and between the two of us, with her passion and talent for cooking and her skills at coming up with new recipes, and my background in business, we built this company,” he said. “We’ve doubled our size every year since we began. It’s fast growth, but it’s also thoughtful growth. We’ve been very sure to keep the same quality, working with many of the same suppliers we worked with when we started years ago.”

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Boulder Organic! packages most of its soups in 24-ounce containers. The serving size is identified as eight ounces, which works when it’s served as a side dish, but most people will want a bit more than that if they’re eating it as an entree, so in practice, most consumers will regard the 24-ounce container as enough to feed two people, Powers said. For club stores, the 24-ounce containers are bundled into a 2-pack, and Target carries a 16-ounce container.

While some of the Boulder Organic! soups are mostly vegetables with chicken stock in the base, many are vegetarian and a few include animal protein along with the vegetables. The heavy emphasis on vegetables in the ingredient deck is partly a response to the local market in Boulder, Powers said. “We have a very active vegetarian community in Boulder. For our little market, it was a good fit. It was a good way to start the company and produce products that would fit with our community.”

The company maintains its commitment to being a socially responsible woman-owned business, and 2 percent of its production is donated to a local food bank. “We try to treat all of our employees fairly and we have a very flat organizational structure,” Powers said. Employees are paid a living wage, and the company’s operations are zero waste, with everything that isn’t used up being composted or recycled. “We’re constantly looking for ways to reduce our environmental footprint further,” Powers said. “We also take food safety very seriously.”

Phoenicia Specialty Foods Brings International Flavors to Houston

Published August 19, 2016

By Lorrie Baumann

STOREFRONT MEDITCO_DSC1496 In a society that’s deeply conflicted about much that’s happening in the Middle East and its potential repercussions for the American homeland, Houston grocer Phoenicia Specialty Foods offers a yummy reminder that we’re all on this planet together and our respective cultures have much to offer each other. Phoenicia Specialty Foods operates in two Houston locations, a 90,000 -square-foot west side location that’s like a warehouse for international foods, and the newer 28,000-square-foot location in downtown Houston.

MOM & DAD The family behind the two stores (retail and wholesale operation), and the original restaurant: parents Zohrab and Arpi Tcholakian, who started the business by opening the Phoenicia Deli in 1983, brother Raffi, who oversees the company’s wholesale business and much of its import operation at the Phoenicia Foods Westside location, brother Haig, who curates the stores’ beer and wine offering and is half the marketing team along with sister Ann-Marie, who also manages the downtown store, also still operate the original restaurant that’s the particular province of the matriarch of the family. “It’s in our blood, and we are cut from the same cloth in regards to our work ethic, passion and detail-oriented nature. Mom is the matriarch of the restaurant, Arpi’s Phoenicia Deli restaurant, which is where it all began. She’s definitely the most famous out of all of us. Everybody recognizes her because she’s always in the restaurant,” says Ann-Marie. “My parents don’t want to retire; they love the business; they love the energy. They really enjoy providing these services and these hard to find specialty items to the community, and also having the opportunity to interact with friendly faces. Dad is always in the store teaching employees and customers about the products’ cooking techniques and origins.”

The stores’ product mix includes more than 50,000 SKUs representing products from more than 50 countries and is focused on international specialty items, especially Middle Eastern, Eastern European and European specialties. Many of the bakery items and prepared foods are produced in house, with some commissaried over from the West Side location to the downtown store.

“There are other stores who sell some of the same products, like olive oils and cheeses, and they call it gourmet, but these were staples that we grew up with and were always in our home… So, we try to keep the prices reasonable on these quality selections. We work to transfer cost saving to our customers through the economies of scale provided by our import buying power at our west side Houston headquarters,” says Ann-Marie.

The Tcholakian family are ethnic Armenians who were living in Lebanon when civil war broke out there. As the war intensified, the family began looking for a way out in 1979, particularly since Arpi was eight months pregnant with her youngest and wanted a safe place to raise her children. The family had a cousin in Houston who lived next to a hospital, so when flight became a matter of survival, Houston it was.

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“Back when my parents started, they had to educate people. They always wanted to make it international because they had a mix of culinary influences being Armenians born in cosmopolitan, European-influenced Lebanon,” says Ann-Marie. “Back then, when my parents started, not many knew what hummus dip was in Texas. Now everybody knows what hummus is.”

As the cafe’s following grew, the Tcholakians added more and more grocery to the business. “It was a struggle in the ’80s for my parents to keep the business open. It just took a lot of work and dedication to keep the business alive in the 1980s in a collapsed economy,” Ann-Marie says. “My brothers and I used to do our homework and watch TV in the back of the store. People knew our lives.” The downtown store opened five years ago after the developer of the building in which the store is now located offered them a space on the ground floor of a residential tower in a neighborhood that hadn’t seen a grocery store for 40 years. “We were very attracted to what the city was doing and what the Downtown District was doing. There is a lovely park next door called Discovery Green with lots of programming and culture, catering to Houston’s diversity. It was a natural fit for Phoenicia,” Ann-Marie says. “We’ve always felt very connected to the Houston’s growth, and it was really exciting to be part of the revitalization of downtown.”

In addition to the grocery, downtown Phoenicia Foods has an in-house beer and wine bar called MKT BAR. This gastropub concept offers comfort food with an international twist, artisan beers, boutique wines, music and art programming and has become a hub for locals and visitors alike. Monday nights are Fun and Games Nights with retro board games, ping pong and more. Wednesdays are Vinyl and Vino Nights with guest disc jockeys playing their favorite vinyl records on stage. Tuesdays and Thursdays are popular MKT Steak Nights, “offering a nice steak for a minimal amount of money, which draws people from the neighborhood,” Ann-Marie says. Cartoons & Cereal is a new event on Saturday mornings, with retro cartoons on the televisions from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. “People are always gravitating to the TVs,” Ann-Marie says. “It’s always been our goal to make Phoenicia Specialty Foods and MKT BAR down-to-earth and fun.”

“For the downtown location, we work hard to create events that attract attention, to gain a clientele. In the urban market space, you have to do a little more to capture people’s attention and to create a neighborhood destination and feel,” Ann-Marie says. “Downtown Houston is still emerging, and so we had to put a lot of energy in from the beginning to grow the business. That’s the reason why MKT BAR exists today.”

“A lot of people come to MKT BAR for a music performance for example, and then they buy their feta cheese to take home. It’s a symbiotic relationship between MKT BAR and the grocery,” she continues. “There are other customers who come for the groceries and discover MKT BAR and are amazed. They work hand in hand very well.”

Retail Foodservice Offers a Gold Mine for Grocers

Published August 19, 2016

By Lorrie Baumann

American consumers have decided that they want good food on their schedule, and they’ll eat it wherever they can get it. Their grocers are eager and increasingly able to provide that for them, and their customers are loving them for it.

So says Wade Hanson, a Principal at Technomic, who presented the company’s market research on this subject during a “Foodservice at Retail” conference presented during the National Restaurant Association’s annual trade show in May. Technomic has 50 years of experience tracking market trends for the restaurant industry, but over the past decade or two, the organization has directed its attention to foodservice wherever it occurs and has been in the ideal position to observe the phenomenon as American consumers began looking for new avenues for their food as the Great Recession put previous options out of their financial reach. It was at that time that the grab and go case at local grocery stores became top of mind as an alternative to fast food restaurants, which were increasingly seen as both unhealthy and unappetizing choices. “We’re in a very different world right now as far as retail and foodservice are happening,” Hanson said.

For grocers, the Great Recession has changed the market landscape as well: center store sales are declining, convenience stores have become more vigorous competitors for Americans’ food dollars and the grocery retail industry is consolidating through mergers and acquisition activity. “Retail foodservice has been the major beneficiary of these changes,” Hanson said. “Retail foodservice is really in transition, but poised to be in a very good position.”

For purposes of their analyses, Hanson and Technomic divide supermarkets into three basic tiers: the foodservice specialists, destination supermarkets and supermarkets with prepared food departments that may consist of extended deli counters offering sliced meats and cheeses. About 10 percent of supermarkets fit into the foodservice specialist category, which offer warm ambiance for in-store diners, an extensive array of cuisine and perhaps a checkout area that’s dedicated to foodservice. About 25 percent of supermarkets fall into the destination supermarket category in which the stores are positioned as full-line grocers with good foodservice options. About half of today’s supermarkets fall into the tier that Technomic defines with prepared food departments, and many or most of them are currently looking at moving up a tier to the destination supermarket category, according to Hanson.

At the same time, convenience stores are also aggressively moving toward more premium foodservice options, he noted.
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Technomic expects that supermarket foodservice will continue to grow at an annual growth rate of about 9 percent over the next 10 years, far exceeding the growth that’s expected for restaurant foodservice, and Hanson predicts that retail foodservice will continue to steal market share from restaurants over the foreseeable future, presenting grocers with a lot of opportunity for profit.

In particular, Hanson anticipates that the line between retail foodservice and restaurants will continue to blur, that younger consumers will drive more widespread use of retail foodservice, and that improving technology such as mobile payments and mobile ordering software will allow more more market segments to compete for the retail foodservice dollar. He suggests that self-serve and made-to-order formats will proliferate in preference to grab and go options. “Grab and go is still doing well, but consumers are gravitating to the idea of customizing their food,” he said.

Ready-to-heat foods will gain traction, with more ethnic entrees that require reheating, he predicted. This is not the same as a ready-to-bake option; it’s the entree that requires just a couple of minutes of reheating in the customer’s home kitchen, he explained.

Transparency in preparation, branding and labeling will help improve consumers’ quality perceptions, and the demand for better-for-you prepared meals will continue to grow, which advantages grocery stores over convenience stores, Hanson predicts. “Consumers are becoming more interested in what’s in it rather than what’s not in it,” he said.

“Consumer acceptance is on the rise, but so are expectations. Everybody is on a level playing field when it comes to meeting consumer expectations,” he said. “Prepared foods gives you an opportunity to differentiate. He noted that some stores are already doing 20 percent of their business in prepared foods. “It’s a gold mine if it’s done right.”