Gourmet News

Beans Beckon in Pandemic Fog

Published November 2, 2020

By Lorrie Baumann

Bean sales went through the roof this spring as the COVID-19 pandemic sent grocery shoppers to their supermarkets with the same motives that prompted the original Paleolithic hunters and gatherers to stalk herds of meat on the hoof and make their annual visits to the same patches of maguey that their parents had harvested. Specialty items on grocers’ shelves were initially passed over when shoppers began stocking their pantries in mid-March, looking first for the conventional brands that they already knew and then, as grocers’ shelves cleared when supply chains couldn’t keep up with panic-buying, picking up specialty items despite their higher prices, said David Browne, a market research consultant who works with the Specialty Food Association on its tracking of the specialty food market. He noted that specialty brands that had surged during the first panic-buying continued to sell well once the panic had subsided, buoyed by shoppers who’d become introduced to them as they stocked their pantries and continued to buy afterwards.

“It was a good opportunity for a lot of specialty brands to get some shelf placement,” added David Lockwood, Consulting Director for Mintel, the market research firm that compiles the data that goes into the SFA’s annual “State of the Specialty Food Industry” report. “This is the year of essentials,” he said as he noted that sales growth of specialty food items in essential categories like bread, meat and beans, rice and grains has been much higher this year than in either of the past two years, outpacing even the growth of plant-based foods.

A Dozen Cousins is one of those brands that has benefited from consumer interest in shelf-stable essentials, said Ibraheem Basir, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of A Dozen Cousins, which makes prepared bean dishes that reflect the culinary traditions behind the bean dishes that his mother used to serve her family when he was a child growing up in a culturally diverse New York City neighborhood. He launched his company in 2018 and sold his first products in 2019. This year, he’s selling his bean dishes to people who’ve suddenly been inspired by the pandemic to stock up, and beans are on their shopping lists. “The business has seen explosive growth. There was just a big boom when people were stocking up and looking for nutritious things to eat,” he said. “As things settled into a routine, we’ve maintained our retail velocity.”

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“Previously, people might have gone out for lunch. They’re now preparing lunch in the middle of the day. That’s not a totally new occasion, but it’s something that they’re doing now,” Basir said. “We’ve seen people looking for solid meal options that don’t include meat, and beans are classic options for that. They’re high in protein, they’re very natural, they’re shelf-stable…. People are buying more and taking fewer trips to the supermarket. As a result, products like ours that are shelf-stable have a renewed benefit.”

A Dozen Cousins launched its most recent products in August of this year with Refried Black Beans and Classic Refried Pinto Beans. They join an existing product line comprising Cuban Black Beans, Mexican Cowboy Pinto Beans and Trini Chickpea Curry. Packaged in 10-ounce pouches that provide two servings, they’re all ready in 60 seconds in the microwave oven.

“The goal for the next year is just to continue growing the business,” Basir said. “We have a product line that we’re excited about, and we think there are many more retailers for whom this would be a great addition to the category.”

Serious Foodie Sauce Connects with a Culture

Published November 2, 2020

By Lorrie Baumann

Serious Foodie, which started out five years ago as a maker of pepper-based sauces, has transformed into a company whose focus is on global, regional, flavorful ingredients. That peppers are still part of the journey is evidenced by its latest sofi Award-winning product, Serious Foodie Brazilian Grill Sauce.

Brazilian Grill Sauce won a silver award this year in the barbecue and hot sauce category. This was Serious Foodie’s third sofi Award, following awards in 2016 for its Blood Orange & Aji Panca Cooking Sauce and in 2018 for Serious Foodie Tamarillo New Zealand Marinade and Dressing.

The new product that won this year’s sofi Award represented a departure from Serious Food’s usual product development process, in that it started at home in Florida rather than during the international travels of Founder Jim Pachence and his family. Most of its products, including the Blood Orange & Aji Panca sauce that won the award in the company’s first year of selling products, are born when Pachence travels to a country that has a cuisine he or his family members admire. He tastes the food, talks about the food, learns about the local ingredients and then he comes home to make a product that uses similar ingredients to demonstrate his new understanding of the culture he visited. “Our travels to Peru taught us quite a bit about the diverse culture – and how Peru became a fusion cuisine culture before chefs in the U.S. ever dreamed about combining Asian with European with native foods,” he said as he described how the Blood Orange & Aji Panca sauce came about. As he learned about Peruvian cuisine during a visit to the country, Pachence came across a sauce that depended on local ingredients that were unfamiliar to him: aji panca, a pepper that’s sweet and smoky as well as spicy, and huacatay, a black mint that’s frequently blended into cream sauces to dress a variety of Peruvian dishes. “We came across a sauce in Lima that used both ingredients, in addition to a native sour orange. The sour orange reminded us of blood orange, which is much easier to obtain,” Pachence said. “We now import both aji panca and huacatay from Peru for this sauce.”

“We tend to do things that are a little bit unusual and a little cutting edge,” he added. “We literally have gone around the world looking at what people eat… and, most importantly, how people share meals. That’s represented in the products, and the recipes. We really try to make this connection of people – that is our mission.”

Development of the Brazilian Grill Sauce that won this year’s sofi Award took a very different path. “We had a bucket of red jalapenos and were trying to figure out what to do with a bucket of jalapenos that’s a little bit different,” he said. “We didn’t want to make chipotle.”

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For Brazilian churrasco, meat is salted but not usually sauced before it’s skewered and placed on the grill, and then it’s served with condiments. “My friends who are Brazilian live by their grill. There is no meal that doesn’t use the grill,” Pachence said. “Those Brazilian steakhouses are often very reminiscent of the style of eating that is done – you’re taking a big slab of meat and cut it into pieces and then hand it around. The meat is unadorned; it’s just the meat as the star. The sauce is for an extra kick of flavor for those interested.”

The Serious Foodie sauce can be used as a condiment sauce for that style of cooking, but it’s also suitable for use as a marinade or a dipping sauce, Pachence said. “It works with any of those techniques. Sugar and salt are kept as low as possible, so it doesn’t burn; it caramelizes,” he said. “We do get a nice depth of flavor when it’s cooked on the grill.”

Although the Brazilian sauce is intended to use as a condiment with meats, Pachence has found other uses for the sauce in his own home. “My wife and I slather it on eggs. We love scrambled eggs with that sauce. It’s a substitute for the generic red sauce,” he said. The Brazilian Grill Sauce is also good on meaty fish, he added. “We’ve tried it on swordfish on the grill – we used it as a grill sauce, and that seemed to work.”

The Brazilian Grill Sauce is also finding its way onto the shelves of specialty food retailers through a route that’s different from that taken by its Serious Foodie predecessors, Pachence said. “We are transitioning a bit where some of these special sauces will be spending a lot of time online before they hit the stores,” he said. “One of the things we’ve learned about our products is that we’ve gained a big cult following. The best way we’ve found to connect with these folks is with online stories…. Most of the people who buy it from us are asking about where they can find it in a store near them. Online is making people search it out.”

The online launch is supported by a strong social media effort and a website buttressed with recipe ideas that let customers know what they do with the sauce,” Pachence said. His plan is that a delayed launch into brick and mortar stores will mean that when the product does arrive on grocers’ shelves, it will already have a following: “We’re building an audience,” he said.
Brazilian Grill Sauce is packaged in 6-ounce jar that’s sold as a six-pack for retailers. The label features bold imagery on the front of the jar and suggestions for use on the back. The suggested retail price for a jar of the sauce is $5.95.

Cookie Company Wins Two sofi Awards in First Time Out

Published November 2, 2020

By Lorrie Baumann

In her first time entering the sofi Awards, the Specialty Food Association’s annual paean to creativity and craft in specialty foods, Susan Palmer, “The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen,” took home two statuettes in the baked goods and bakery desserts category. She won the silver award for her Monster Cookie Pie, a ready-to-bake spin on a skillet cookie that’s loaded with peanut butter, chocolate, oats and chocolate candy, while her Elvis Cookie Pie won a bronze sofi Award with its peanut butter, banana and chocolate to evoke Elvis Presley’s banana and peanut butter sandwiches. “I’d had the intention of entering for the past couple of years,” she said. Those plans fell apart, but, “This year, when I heard the announcement, I was on it.”

Palmer started her career in the specialty food business with a food blog that she named “The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen,” where she posted inspiration for home cooks and bakers along with recipes for Oatmeal Breakfast Bars with Almond Butter and Jam; Baked Brie en Croute with Honeyed Almonds, Cherries and Thyme and Honey Walnut Fig Cake around weekly meal plans for home cooks looking to change up their dinner repertoire with healthy options. “Writing and cooking have always been a passion of mine,” she said. “Everyone cooked in my family. My brother was a professional chef for a while…. My mom made everything from scratch. She worked full-time, and she would always come home and cook a delicious dinner every night. We visited farm stands before farmers markets were a thing.”

In 2011, she won her first local baking competition, Brooklyn, New York’s Cookie Takedown with a people’s choice award for her Chocolate Salty Cara-Mal-Lard Cookies, a triple chocolate cookie filled with caramel made with duck fat. The next year, she won more awards at the next Cookie Takedown, and she won an Ice Cream Takedown as well. “I took top prizes in a lot of competitions. That was when I decided I was doing something that people really like,” she said. “I was doing an office job that I wasn’t happy with, and I decided it was time to figure this out and move on from there.”
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Her blog was earning enough at that point to give her the freedom to chuck the job, and once she’d figured out that what she wanted to do next was to focus on cookies, she booked space in an incubator kitchen and launched a Kickstarter campaign to help her fund her Little Red Kitchen Bake Shop. She planned to take orders for cookies on her website, bake them in an incubator kitchen and put them in the mail the next day. “Anyone’s going to be happy if you cook a meal for them, but baked goods touch that special place in your heart,” she said. “Can you be unhappy if someone’s just handed you a cookie? I’m a happiness maker.”

It took a bit more than a year to develop the recipes for her first product line and get her business off the ground. Two years later, she invented cookie pies, giant cookies made from the best ingredients she could find, with doughs studded with inclusions and packed into foil pie pans and frozen ready to ship to consumers who’d bake them at home. She made several varieties: the Monster Cookie Pie that won the silver award this year; Chocolate Peanut Butter; Caramel Snickerdoodle and the Elvis Cookie Pie that won the bronze award. Those varieties are all available for wholesale. She also offers a couple of other varieties for local customers, Rocky Road and Kitchen Sink, which includes pretzels and potato chips. Rocky Road and Kitchen Sink don’t freeze well, so they’re not shipped or offered for wholesale.

Once her wholesale business started to take off, Palmer moved out of the incubator kitchen and into a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn. She put her blog on hiatus, and when she got the chance to enter the sofi Awards this year, she took it. Now she’s taking the COVID-19-enforced business slow-down as her opportunity to route a course for her journey chauffeured by sofi. She’s on the hunt for a sales agent who can broker her Cookie Pies along the East Coast, since her products arrive in their best condition when they’re in transit for no more than a day or two from Brooklyn. “I feel like we’re sort of in a holding pattern right now,” she said. “I’m looking for a New York-based broker. Sales has never been my strong point. I’m hoping that the sofi wins will lead me there.”