Gourmet News

Destination Stonewall Kitchen

Published July 15, 2016

By Lorrie Baumann

York Company Store Stonewall Kitchen is known across the U.S. as the maker of a range of specialty foods products that runs from mixes for breakfast classics like blueberry muffins and chocolate chip scones to dessert sauces and confections, but in the Northeastern United States, the brand also belongs to 10 retail stores that have become recreation destinations for New England tourists as well as local shoppers. “It’s just a neat part of our business. As we think about food businesses in general, there are not a lot who can go to customers with the empathy that comes from operating stores themselves. We can say things to other retailers like, ‘We know that this pricing can work for you because it works in our retail stores,’” said John Stiker, Stonewall Kitchen’s Chief Executive Officer for the past 18 months. With his background in consumer packaged goods rather than in retailing, he came to Stonewall Kitchen unsure about how the retail operation fit into Stonewall Kitchen’s overall business, but he’s come to appreciate the role it plays in keeping the company in sympathy both with its customers and with consumers. Consumers, in turn, have given the Stonewall Kitchen stores a role in their weekend and vacation plans, their social media posts and the recipes in their lifestyle blogs. “It’s a big part of how guests get to know the brand,” Stiker said.

Mornings start at the Stonewall Kitchen stores with the opening of up to 100 jars to be sampled that day. “If you want to try something that’s not open, we’ll open it for you,” Stiker said.

That sampling yields not only enthusiastic customers but also a wealth of market research that the company uses in its product development. “In 10 stores, we generate 4 million samples a year. That’s not something that other food companies have the ability to do,” Stiker said. Test kitchens in three of the stores have regular sampling programs in which they seek customer reactions to products in development. “It’s a neat part of the business that we think is crucial to the brand in establishing our heritage and authenticity,” Stiker said.

Peach Blossom Story Merchandising is also a huge part of Stonewall Kitchen’s efforts to create a guest experience that will bring customers back time and again to see what’s new and interesting in the store. “When you come in, you see something different than what you saw two months ago,” Stiker said. “Five times a year, the company’s merchandising team sets up four or five seasonal display tables in the smaller stores and up to 10 in the York location. Each merchandise story is designed to be a visually interesting evocation of a theme that’s decided a season or two ahead of time. Each combines food products made by Stonewall Kitchen, food products made by other companies, soft goods such as tea towels and table linens, hard goods such as gift items and cooking tools and items that are just there as props to support the theme. That might be a model sailboat for a sailing theme or a tiki torch for a grilling-themed display.

The displays give consumers ideas about items they could add to their baskets to complement the corn bread mix or dessert sauce they came in for and they encourage guests to explore the whole store rather than picking up a quick jar of jam and leaving with just that. The product selection varies greatly depending on the theme, the season and Stonewall Kitchen’s new product introductions. For fall, it’ll generally include products made with apple cider flavors, for instance, while holiday displays will almost certainly include confections, and in the summer, Stonewall Kitchen barbecue sauces will probably be featured. “For most of those seasons we have products we launch that are specific to those seasons,” Stiker said.

Our retail stores are really the epitome of our brand. It [Our merchandising] brings to life the fact that we are a lifestyle brand aimed at inspiring, encouraging and exciting the at home chef. Everything we do is aimed at showing even the novice cook how easily they can impress guests with outstanding food and can entertain in style. Much of our non-Stonewall Kitchen product is selected and placed with our seasonal stories to inspire our guests on how to bring together a look or a feeling to their get together or party, added Janine Somers, Stonewall Kitchen’s Director of Marketing.
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Stonewall Kitchen its new products this year at the Summer Fancy Food Show. “We think we’ve got a great lineup planned for July of 2016. Some of it plays off what we started in January 2016, when we launched our first organic products. They have been just fabulously received, great blockbusters,” Stiker said. They include a pair of barbecue sauces, Honey Miso Barbecue and Sesame Teriyaki Sauce, and an organic Honey Orange Balsamic Salad Dressing. “It’s yummy,” Stiker commented.

For breakfast, a strength of Stonewall Kitchen’s product line, there’s also an Organic Pancake and Waffle Mix and an Organic Stonewall Scone Mix. “Both of which are delicious,” Stiker said.

Stonewall Kitchen will also be offering more very spicy condiments to appeal to more adventurous eaters, including Spicy Chili Bacon Jam that will appeal to the many current fans of the company’s savory jams, which do extremely well in the market, with Hot Pepper Jelly and Red Pepper Jelly among Stonewall Kitchen’s best sellers and its Maple Bacon Onion Jam, which is popular on pizza and also as an addition to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, according to Stiker. “Spicy Chili Bacon Jam should be able to do a lot of that,” he said.

For the dedicated chili-heads, Stonewall Kitchen will be offering Ghost Pepper Salsa. “It’s going to have a lot of heat to it,” Stiker said. It’s so hot that the company’s usual 28-employee tasting panel couldn’t really wrap their mouths around it enthusiastically enough to approve it for production, so Stonewall Kitchen called together a volunteer group of people who already knew that they liked a really hot salsa and let them try it. “That’s when we realized we had a winner,” Stiker said. “It’s an absolutely terrific but very hot salsa.” To quench thirst without putting out the fire after a taste of the Ghost Pepper Salsa, Stonewall Kitchen is introducing Spicy Margarita Mixer.

For home cooks who want traditional taste without the traditional time commitment, Stonewall Kitchen is expanding its Meal Starter line with Yankee Pot Roast Meal Starter.“It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect a meal starter for a Yankee pot roast to have,” Stiker says. “The home cook just adds the beef.”

The new product introductions include a number of other items from Farmhouse Cheesy Grits for breakfast to Creme de Menthe Chocolate Sauce that are also extensions of the kinds of products we expect from Stonewall Kitchen, and you’ll be able to taste them all by visiting the Stonewall Kitchen booth at the show, but while you’re there, be sure also to note new 2-ounce grab-and-go packaging for the company’s Ultimate Snack Mix and Spicy Ultimate Snack Mix. The Stonewall Kitchen snack mixes represent the gourmet indulgence end of the snack food spectrum, and these new products are designed as a convenient snack solution for the American consumer who wants a quick pick-me-up on the go. They’ll display well on a countertop or next to the cash register, Stiker said.

Anthony Bourdain Advises Grocers to Find Ways to Offer Authenticity

Published July 15, 2016

By Lorrie Baumann

Bourdain for web cropped The conventional supermarket may be doomed by competition with online retailers and delivery services and by Americans’ search for authenticity in the foods they eat, according to Anthony Bourdain, a featured speaker at this year’s Dairy-Deli-Bake Seminar & Expo.

Dairy-Deli-Bake is a production of the International Dairy, Deli and Bakery Association, and the trade show was held June 5-7 in Houston, Texas. Next year’s event is scheduled for June 4-6 in Anaheim.

Bourdain pointed out the rapid evolution of Americans’ interest in their food, which has helped propel his career into the stratosphere. “Eighteen years ago, I was dunking French fries for a living, more or less,” he told a packed theater. “Life was relatively good, but I was quite certain that I would never see Vietnam, for instance.”

Today, Bourdain is better known as a best-selling author, television host and executive producer of CNN’s “Parts Unknown” than as the chef he was before “Kitchen Confidential,” his memoir of his young days in restaurant kitchens, became an unexpected best-seller. He is currently developing a New York City food hall modeled after a Singapore street market, a collection of small market stalls, where shoppers will buy fresh and freshly prepared products from a variety of vendors. The project is now projected to open in 2018, and in preparation, Bourdain has been giving a lot of thought to the kind of food Americans want to eat and how they want to shop for it.

He pointed out in his talk to the Dairy-Deli-Bake attendees that the American culinary tastes are evolving rapidly and pointed to the growing importance of organic produce in today’s supermarkets and to the popularity of kale as an example. “Kale, who used to eat kale? It was garbage,” he said.

“Mario Batali was among the first to harness the power of television celebrity. He opened Babbo and started serving hooves and snouts, brains and kidneys, which is to say authentic Italian food the way they made it in Italy. No one was asking for this in America. Mario created a a market for that,” Bourdain said. “Everybody wants that now. This was entirely a chef-led thing. We care about who’s making our food now, for the first time in history. We also care about where our food comes from. We never cared about that before.”

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Now, though, supermarket chains can’t keep up with the speed of this evolution, challenged as they are by the rapid development of options in the food marketplace such as meal kit delivery services and online grocers. In New York City, for instance, his grocery store shopping is already limited primarily to fresh ingredients, since he can have anything nonperishable that’s heavy or awkward to carried simply delivered to his apartment. “If it’s not perishable, and I don’t need to squeeze it, I’m buying it online,” he said. “I’m not trusting anyone to pick out my cheese for me. I want to poke that…. Can you keep up? I think you’re going to have to change and specialize.”

Bourdain predicts that supermarkets may eventually continue to exist only as either a virtual space or as a collection of specialty shops within stores – the concept behind his market. American consumers will always want to shop for their meat, their cheeses and their fish in person because they’ll want to be sure that they’re getting fresh product, but they’ll want to buy their meat from a specialty butcher who will sell them organ meats and specialty cuts rather than just the muscle cuts that supermarket meat counters typically offer today and that offer very little challenge to a cook eager to impress friends with demonstrations of culinary skill, Bourdain predicted. “I can train a reasonably intelligent poodle how to cook a filet mignon. I would rather be complimented on a cheek or a hoof,” he said.

Young people in particular are now following the lead of a new generation of rising celebrity chefs who aren’t so much interested in easy preparations of luxury ingredients. These chefs are increasingly likely to have come from an Asian or Hispanic family background and to have grown up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, and they’re now often celebrating simple bowls of noodles or street tacos with interesting flavors rather than the traditional American dishes – the foods they grew up eating in their homes and neighborhoods. He noted that 78 percent of Houston residents under the age of 30 are not of Anglo-Saxon family origin. “That’s a hell of a lot of people who grew up eating something other than meat loaf,” he said.

The young people who are following these young chefs are driven by an intense search for authenticity in their food, according to Bourdain. “What are people looking for in food now? What are they valuing? It has changed. I think what people are looking for more than anything else is perceived authenticity. They want that sense that they’re getting the real thing, the real deal,” he said.

For today’s grocer, the key to remaining relevant in the face of this rapidly evolving food marketplace might be to emulate the traditional cooks who spend their whole culinary lives doing one kind of food, sometimes through more than one generation, and, through practice, learn how to do that food very well, he said. “Find the thing you do better than anyone else…. Ask yourself what you’re good at first. That’s the way to relevance – asking yourself what you can do that the person across the street can’t do or won’t do,” he said.

“Swim against the current,” he advised. “Decide you’re not going to do what everyone else is doing just as well…. A certain level of fearlessness is required here – and confidence in yourself.”

House Passes GMO-Labeling Legislation

Published July 14, 2016

The chief state agriculture officials from around the country praised the House of Representatives today for passing bipartisan, national legislation on the disclosure of genetically engineered ingredients. National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) CEO Dr. Barbara P. Glenn issued the following statement on the bill’s passage:

“We thank Congress for working together over the past year, finding shared values, and passing a solution to stop a burdensome fifty-state patchwork of GMO labeling laws. This legislation reaffirms the safety of genetic improvements of today’s agriculture, while providing American consumers with marketing information about the ingredients of their food. We look forward to President Obama signing this legislation into law and we stand ready to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to successfully implement this measure. ”
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NASDA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit association which represents the elected and appointed commissioners, secretaries, and directors of the departments of agriculture in all fifty states and four U.S. territories.