10BF
Anniversary
Central Kitchen Produces More and More of Bristol’s Own Signature Items Five days a week, 24 hours a day, Bristol Farms’ Central Kitchen is producing more than 800 items, such as meals, salads, soups and bakery products, to go out to the stores. Why go to all the trouble of operating a 10,000-s.f. facility and paying 60 employees, most of them full-time, to make products you could buy somewhere else? President and CEO Kevin Davis has the answer: “We could buy soup cheaper or we could buy handmade products from a third party cheaper, but they wouldn’t be as good a quality, say, as the 80 different fresh soups we make. We make items in our Central Kitchen and ship to our stores because we want them to be fresher, higher quality; we want to control the ingredients, we want to know that they’re natural and we want them to be fresh when a store gets them.” Doug Poling, senior director of nonperishables and bakery, further explained the rationale: “We want to kind of corner the market by producing products that customers can only buy from us. ey fall in love with the products from us, and we kind of put the velvet handcuffs on them.” According to Steve Howard, senior director of foodservice and Central Kitchen, the company’s signature soup program has been a big hit with shoppers and been very profitable for Bristol Farms. Five soups are always available: Russian Cabbage, Clam Chowder, Matzo Ball Soup, Tomato Basil Bisque and Chicken Noodle, says Howard. “en we rotate another 10 to 15 soups a month, depending on the season. We just came out of summer, when we offered strawberry soups and gazpachos, cold soups to help beat the heat. We get into some heartier soups in the winter. We’ll go through probably about 500,000 gallons of soup a year.” e soups are packed and shipped, “usually within 24 to 36 hours, so we’re getting the freshest product available out to our stores. And we’re creating new and exciting items all the time,” he says.
About 90 percent of the ready-to-eat items in Bristol Farms delis, whether full meals, entrees or salads, are produced in the Central Kitchen as well. Howard says everyone on the foodservice team as well as Central Kitchen staff work together to come up with ideas for items that will keep customers returning again and again. “We’re developing new ideas and staying out in the forefront of the ever-changing, exciting food industry,” he says. Bakery production was added to the Central Kitchen about four years ago as Bristol Farms continued to look at ways to give customers products they can only find at its stores. So it brought one of its seasoned bakers, Trevor Strand, into the Central Kitchen, to start producing, from scratch, a number of SKUs, Poling says. “Today we produce about 75 different (bakery) items in our Central Kitchen from scratch. Again, that number was zero in 2009. We are really, really continuing to try to grow that segment for a couple of reasons, but the primary reason is we know that anything that we bake from scratch using proprietary recipes or items that obviously consumers can only get from us, where it’s not to our advantage to bring in products from outside vendors who can obviously sell to other retailers in our marketplace. at segment continues to grow.” Texas Chocolate Cake is the top-selling bakery item that comes out of the Central Kitchen, he adds. Also popular are its Sour
Cream Coffee Cake as well as Banana Coffee Cake created from a recipe developed by Chef Jamie Gwen, a wellknown local chef and culinary consultant for Bristol Farms. Bristol Farms’ specialty cupcakes also continue to sell well. They were voted “Best Cupcake in Orange County” in 2007 by the Orange County Register. Bristol Farms has committed to offering shoppers as many natural and organic products as possible throughout its stores, and that commitment extends to ingredients in its baked goods. “It’s been a challenge, I’ll tell you, to try to find a clean, all-natural sour cream or food colorings,” Poling says. “We’ve switched over to a lot of cage-free organic eggs, but sourcing a lot of these products is a challenge. But we’re kind of chipping away at it, one SKU at a time.” According to Davis, “We think that the real benefit to a shopper is having a relationship with the store and the people in that store that they feel they can trust. So to that point, rather than sell other people’s products throughout our store in a lot of the perishable departments, we simply call the quality ‘Bristol’s Own.’ Our positioning on our product quality, both private label and the products we make fresh from our Central Kitchen, is simply that it’s Bristol’s Own. We put our name on it…and that gives them the confidence that this isn’t somebody else’s branded product being sold in our store, that this is what Bristol is providing to us and they’re putting their full heart into the quality and their name behind that quality and that experience. I think that’s why our customers trust us and have such faith in the product quality and the experience in our stores.”
88 • Bristol Farms 30th Anniversary – A Shelby Report Special Section
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