NOW PREMIERING:
NOW PREMIERING:
NOW PREMIERING:
DeBrand Chocolate
ENZO Olive Oil
Stonewall Kitchen
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SEE PAGE 18
SEE PAGE 22
GOURMET NEWS
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T H E
VOLUME 85, NUMBER 7 JULY 2020 n $7.00
NEWS & NOTES n
Clear-Headed Choices for Conscious Consumers PAGE 6
B U S I N E S S
N E W S P A P E R
BY LORRIE BAUMANN
Barons Market opened its ninth location on May 22 in the Otay Ranch neighborhood of Chula
4Sisters Grow Rice in America PAGE 10
NATURALLY HEALTHY n
Mission-Driven Company Continues to Innovate PAGE 13
SUMMER SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT n
Now Premiering PAGE 15
Vista, California. A grand opening had been planned for April, complete with a ribbon-cutting,
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Brighter Flavors Ahead PAGE 35
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face-painting, 15 to 20 demonstrations throughout the new store and live music. “We usually have 600, 700, maybe 800 people just waiting to get into the store,” said Rachel Shemirani, Senior Vice President of Barons Market and daughter of Founder Joe Shemirani. “It’s a big party, and part of that party is serving food.” And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit southern California like a freight train jumping the tracks and crashing through the station. Shemirani re-
members when the panic-buying started. “It was March 13 when the panic buying in California started,” she recalls. “We were at the job fair for our new store, and 12 or 13 managers were there to do the interviewing. We started hearing stories about what was happening in the stores, and within 15 minutes, we sent most of them back to their stores. It just went very crazy in a minuscule amount of time.” It quickly became obvious that plans for a festive grand opening weren’t the first priority. Barons pushed back the new store’s opening from April to May, installed
In 1926, Karen Toufayan’s grandfather Haroutoun was a baker living amidst an Armenian community in Egypt. As soon as he could after he emigrated to the United States in the mid-1960s, he set out to make a living in his new country doing what he knew best
– making the pita bread that had its origins in the prehistory of the Middle East. In the fall of 2018, Toufayan Bakeries celebrated 50 years of doing business in the U.S. Haroutoun and his son Harry set up their bakery near the New York-New Jersey border with a small retail store in front and the bakery in the back. “They would bake the bread and sell it in their store and load it up
with a Long, Slow Kiss of Heat
BY LORRIE BAUMANN
in a station wagon and go out and sell it to restaurants and other retail stores,” Karen said. Toufayan’s business as a wholesale bakery really started when Harry persuaded a local delicatessen that his front counter would be a great place to merchandise bread to go along with the sliced meats that the store was selling to customers who were buying them for sandwiches
oo’mämē is a line of products that present consumers with one of those, “Is it a bird? Is it a plane?” moments. The labels for oo’mämē Mexican Chile Infusion and oo’mämē Chinese Chile Infusion both promise “1001 Uses. One Spoon,” and a look past the label and through the glass to the product itself automatically begins suggesting some of those uses to the savvy home cook. Visible through the glass are flakes immediately identifiable as chiles along with ingredients like pieces of dried fruits and whole seeds that are meticulously listed in the product’s ingredient label. Clearly, oo’mämē Founder Mark Engel is not a proponent of the five-ingredients-or-less school of thought, since these 14-ingredient lists eschew simplicity in favor of complexity and depth, a promise that’s redeemed in full once the jar is opened and the spicy aromas of culinary traditions developed through eons of experience waft into the atmosphere. “These recipes are hacks to make great food easily,” Engel said. “You can do anything with it, but everyone has his own way.” The Mexican Chile Infusion is
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oats for your breakfast, but you’d never find either white rice or refined cereals. “She was a trailblazer as a woman in the ‘20s, and in her focus on wellness in a meat and potatoes world.... She was brimming with vitality up to 100 years of age. She had an orange tint to her skin from an excess of betacarotene. Never walked with a cane,” he said. “That was the seed of the idea when I was thinking
about my interest in the snack space – and in the healthy snack space in particular.” Weiss remembers that his great-grandmother used to tell him that if he ate a piece of fruit, he should eat all of it – roots, rinds, stems and seeds, he said. She believed – and she told her great-grandson from the time he was eight or 10 years old – that the parts of the fruit that most people discarded had their own nutritional properties that his body needed, and he shouldn’t just throw those away. When he
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Family Tradition Drives Toufayan Bakeries Through Challenges of Pandemic BY LORRIE BAUMANN
SPECIAL FEATURE
T H E
Barons Market Opens New Store Amidst Pandemic Thoughtful Sauces
SUPPLIER NEWS n
F O R
Dried Fruit Snacks with a-Peel BY LORRIE BAUMANN
Some of us had grandmothers who handed out home-baked cookies left and right. Others of us had fore-mothers who urged us to eat our vegetables because they’re good for us. Matt Weiss had a great-grandmother, Helen Seitner, who ran a health food store and urged him to eat his fruits whole – apple peels, peach skins, watermelon rinds and all. “She was one of those people I would go to
visit in Phoenix when I was a little boy,” he recalls. “She actually opened up her own natural foods store in the 1920s, Helen Seitner’s Stay-Well Health Shop. This was well before kale was cool.”
That little store was about 800 to 1,000 square feet of sales floor where you could buy a sack of carrots or whole-grain flour or the
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