Bristol Farms 30th Anniversary

16BF

Anniversary

Bristol Farms Veterans Geoff Babb, 22 Years Geoff Babb has been store director at Rolling Hills for almost three years, but his career at Bristol Farms began back in 1990 as a grocery clerk. He didn’t plan a career in food retailing, but the growth potential he saw at Bristol Farms made him rethink his plans. He worked the Woodland Hills, Newport Beach and Mission Viejo stores prior to Rolling Hills.

Another factor that played into his decision to stay at Bristol farms is the company culture.

“We’ve always had a family atmosphere at Bristol Farms, from when it was actually family Geoff Babb owned to present day. Management is very easy to work with,” he says.

“And no matter which store you go to, you always meet great people to work with.

And there’s a lot of support from the people at the office that we get at the store level.

“We were pretty much the original foodie store in Southern California, but the thing that’s always attracted me to this kind of company is that we put people first,” Babb says. “Obviously, our customers come before anything, but in terms of the employees and the relationships that you build, I have friendships going back over 20 years, good friendships, because I worked at Bristol Farms and stayed here and keep in contact with people. It’s our approach, even though it’s not really on paper or on our mission statement: People come first at Bristol Farms.

“When I got married 10 years ago, and I think about 90 percent of my wedding party was people I work with. We spend holidays together. It’s really unique and special to have that kind of opportunity to just meet different people and make lifelong friends.”

Steve Howard, 24 Years

Steve Howard

Steve Howard was a Bristol Farms holiday hire in 1988, working in the gift department at the original store in Rolling Hills. When the holidays were over, he moved over to the deli.

“I grew up in the delis,” he says, “then became an assistant store director when they started to create the store director programs.”

Store directors in conventional supermarkets typically come out of the grocery department, “but being that we’re such a perishables oriented company, our owners at the time had the foresight to start to take some folks out of the meat departments and delis to make them assistant store directors.”

He became store director at the Manhattan Beach store, was moved to Redondo Beach,

then Newport Beach.

After that, Howard spent about four years in the accounts payable department overseeing the implementation of some new systems before he was promoted to senior director of foodservice and Central Kitchen, a position he has held for seven years. e foodservice segment includes deli, specialty cheese, catering and Bristol Cafes.

His foodservice experience began at 16 in his hometown of Palos Verdes at Marineland, where he flipped burgers at Gulliver’s Galley to feed the masses who came to watch the killer whale show.

Howard has moved back to Palos Verdes where he and his wife Tracy, accounts payable manager for Bristol Farms, are raising middle-school daughters McKenna and Holly.

“Bristol Farms is not only a great place to work, but there are several couples that became married out of our jobs,” he says. e “family” atmosphere at Bristol Farms also comes from the fact that the leadership team is accessible.

“We still have a small enough company that we have access to top-down leadership, (like) Kevin (Davis, president and CEO) and Sam Masterson (EVP of operations). It’s neat that we’re still not too big, that there’s still somewhat of a family environment. e ability to be nimble and creative and have some interaction with management is great.”

Howard also is quick to credit the team at Bristol Farms for the success of all the different facets of foodservice, mentioning Melinda Race (director of catering & café), Rich Ferranda (director of deli & cheese), Michelle Salatino (foodservice merchandising assistant) and Scott Wallerstedt (deli & cheese merchandiser).

“It’s a team effort for the whole foodservice division, and I’m blessed to have them. ey have the ability to change on a dime. “e thing about foodservice is we have food that lasts a short amount of time, so

94 • Bristol Farms 30th Anniversary – A Shelby Report Special Section

you really have to have the training and the experience and the foresight to be thinking two hours, three hours ahead all the time. ere’s probably more moving pieces in foodservice than in any other parts of the store.

“We’re excited to celebrate 30 years of business, which in today’s world is a great accomplishment,” says Howard. “For the ‘foodies,’ the folks that love food, we’re one of the best, if not the best, specialty market in Southern California. But we’ll go toe to toe with anybody in the country.”

Ernie Mathis, 25 Years In his quarter-century at Bristol Farms, Ernie Mathis has seen the company come full circle.

He was there when the company was sold the first time, to the Kidd/Kamm investment firm, and former record executive Lou Kwiker became president.

With that change in ownership, Bristol Farms stores started carrying some more mainstream grocery products, which was a departure for the company.

“We never used to do that. It was always gourmet, natural food, and I thought that set us apart, but then we were trying to get into the big business and be a force in the industry,” Mathis recalls. e company has gone back to being privately owned again and the merchandise mix is once again going back to what Bristol Farms initially was known for—the high-quality organic, natural, “clean” food that customers can trust is good for them.

While the company still carries some traditional grocery brands for those customers who want onestop-shopping, returning to its roots seems natural.

“We’re in a different league,” Mathis says.

An opportunity too good to pass up Mathis did not set out to make a career in the grocery business but Bristol Farms changed his mind.

Ernie Mathis Now the district manager overseeing seven of the Bristol Farms stores, primarily in Los Angeles County, Mathis started out at Vons and spent about a year there before he “walked up the street and applied at Bristol Farms. I had never heard of it. I got hired on the spot—it was a lot different back then!”

He started out as a courtesy clerk, and for about the first eight years, while the football player was going to school and working mostly weekends, he always planned to do something else. “en, as we started opening stores, and I was starting to get promoted, and it evolved into a career,” he says. He went from courtesy clerk to grocery clerk to assistant grocery manager to grocery manager to assistant store director and then store director.

He became assistant district manager working at headquarters in 2006 and was promoted to district manager two years later.

Mathis oversees the sales, the labor, all the numbers, at his seven locations, traveling to each store over the course of a week.

“I meet with the store directors and walk the stores and check for standards, store conditions, customer service—just monitoring basically all of that.”

It’s exciting to Mathis that even though Bristol Farms has been around for 30 years, there are some who still don’t know about Bristol Farms, and he gets to be an ambassador for the brand when people ask him about his work.

“We’re still evolving. It’s been a slow evolution over 30 years, and we’re still evolving.

We’ve tried different avenues and tried different things, and we’re still going strong.

I’m still growing in my career, and I also know Bristol Farms is still growing.”

Doug Poling, 29 Years Doug Poling may have the most seniority of all at Bristol Farms, and maybe the most pronounced sense of humor, too. e senior director of non-perishables and bakery joined Bristol Farms about six months after the first store opened, in the spring of 1983. He was 16 years old and started out washing dishes at the café at the first store in Rolling Hills to earn spending money. A friend of his worked there, “and the rest, as they say, is history,” says Poling.

“It’s a good relationship and continues to be. ey haven’t figured out a reason to get rid of me yet, or they keep putting up with me. I’m not sure which,” he jokes.

He spent the first 10 years in foodservice at Bristol Doug Poling Farms, eventually becoming foodservice manager.

He then transitioned into store operations as a store director, and then finished his operations career four years ago as a district manager. He moved into bakery then, just as Bristol Farms had made the decision to begin baking as many of its

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