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GOURMET NEWS JUNE 2017 www.gourmetnews.com RETAILER NEWS 1 1 Making Fantasies Come to Life Kitchen Fantasy's knife sharpening serv- ice also caters to both professional and home cooks. Along with a sharpening serv- ice with pickup and delivery for restau- rants, Kitchen Fantasy has in-store sharpening for everyone. "People wash their knives in the dishwasher. They're cut- ting on hard surfaces or granite counter- tops. We really stress making a conversation," says Rodriguez. "People will come in and say, 'You sharpened my knives two weeks ago and they're already dull.' That's a good thing; that's a conversation that will usually end in a sale. We can get them something that will hold an edge bet- ter for only 20 dollars more." Kitchen Fantasy spares 400 square feet to cooking classes, currently taking on 12 classes a month on subjects ranging from French galettes to sushi. "Our sushi classes are the place where lots of people try sushi for the first time," says Ro- driguez. "We have a lot of frustrated chefs over here that want to put duck on the menu, and we're the place where people get to try things like that." Kids classes for parties are popular at the store, and Ro- driguez doesn't go easy on them. "With the popularity of baking shows on TV, they want to do baking competitions. We give a little class, and then they prepare the pastries for a judge the parents choose," says Rodriguez. Kids from 8 to 13 learn techniques as complicated as crème anglaise and even souffles. "When you start with a good foundation, those things aren't intimidating for you," says Rodriguez. "If you learn how to make a souffle at 10, you're up for almost any challenge." In the Temecula area, two products stand out with growing popularity. Sous vide cir- culators have gained interest with the po- tential for temperature-perfect steaks. "A few restaurants in town use it. It really helps your steak not get sent back," Ro- driguez adds. One of the selling points Ro- driguez points out is the fact that it can hold foods at temperature for up to 12 hours without ill effect, and some cheaper cuts of meat are even improved by all that time in the water bath. Fermenting is pop- ular because of the proposed health bene- fits, and a growing interest in artisan cooking. "You can always buy a fermenting crock for $200 or $300," says Rodriguez. "That always stopped the home cook be- cause you can buy a hundred pounds of sauerkraut for that! I picked up a line of home fermenting caps and weights – that's a lot better for them." While these products have been on the rise, one tool is surprisingly stagnant for the area: grinders. While the casual ob- server would expect the interest in gluten-free eating and natural foods in southern California would increase sales in flour makers, but the results haven't been as expected. "I have a few cus- tomers that who are really into it, but it's one of those products that sits on the shelf for a long time," Rodriguez said. "It's sad, because there are stores that sell grains and rices in bulk, but it's not really taking off right now." GN BY MICAH CHEEK Near the tip of southern California wine country, Kitchen Fantasy is catering to home cooks and restaurateurs alike. Ernie Rodriguez, who has been selling kitchenware since 1984, has made his store thrive in the same shopping center as a Tar- get and a Home Goods. "It's a symbiotic re- lationship," says Rodriguez. "A lot of times, [customers] go into Target looking for something and they're disappointed." The store has invested greatly into rela- tionships with local restaurants. "We're selling Chefworks and high-end knives for them, too," says Rodriguez. "A lot of the local restaurants want me to just be a restaurant supply." Surprisingly, profes- sional equipment has sold quite well to home cooks as well. "Most of the homes here are a bit larger, with larger backyards. People will come in and buy stuff for these big events they do," says Rodriguez. "Mom at home loves the restaurant supply stuff. It's really great having those hotel pans – they're so versatile." Grocery Store Continued from PAGE 1 goal is that we want to be a force for good in a community that is really struggling. We don't want to make food that's going to set you back." The food is donated or bought through special buying opportunities from manu- facturers and other suppliers and is sold to anyone in the community who cares to come and shop at the Dorchester neighbor- hood store. The Daily Table employs 38 people and has saved more than a million pounds of food from the landfill. Most of its approximately 11,000 cus- tomers are income-qualified, which is a eu- phemistic way of saying that they're poor. According to an "American Community Survey" prepared in 2013 by the U.S. Cen- sus Bureau, the neighborhood's population is about half African American, about 10 percent Asian, about 17 percent Hispanic or Latino and about 23 percent White. Al- most a third of them were born outside the United States, almost a quarter of those older than 25 years never received a high school diploma, almost a third of those older than 16 don't have a job, and they have a per capita income of about $22,120 per year. About a quarter of them got Food Stamps at some point in the 12 months pre- vious to the report. This is an area where it's a lot easier not to make money selling food than it would be to make a profit, which doesn't bother Rauch, who said he got his practice not making money in the grocery business in his early career at Erewhon, a hippy-dippy Southern Califor- nia food distributorship that no longer ex- ists. "Back in those days, there were co-ops and a lot of people felt that they shouldn't make money off food," Rauch joked to his audience. "Everyone was very successful in not making money off of food." He's changed a lot of his ideas since then, and as his successful tenure at Trader Joe's indicates, he no longer believes that profit- ing from the sale of food is evil. "We run it as a for-profit, even though it's a non- profit," Rauch said. "The idea is to create a business that can pay its own expenses without philanthropic help. Once you're sustainable, you're scalable." Rauch opened The Daily Table in 2015 after he'd "graduated" from Trader Joe's – he says that "retired" doesn't really describe the way he's lived his life after leaving that job – and gone on to become involved in a year- long Harvard Advanced Leadership Initia- tive fellowship at Harvard University that inspired him to think about how he might lead an effort to solve the problem of hunger in the United States. He was looking at the fact that one in six Americans strug- gles with hunger. "This idea that one in six Americans are hungry suggests that this must be some kind of logistics problem," he said. It turns out that solving hunger wasn't as easy as figuring out a better way to get food from the producer to the consumer. "As it turned out, hunger in America isn't a shortage of calories," he said, noting that obesity levels skyrocketed between 2000 and 2010, indicating that even people who were hungry were getting more than enough calories. "But they're the wrong kind of calories," he said. "They're not getting the nutrients they need. The challenge isn't a full stomach; it's a healthy meal." Coming from his back- ground as a commercial gro- cer, Rauch decided that the solution might lay in a busi- ness model he knows well: "It turns out that we are hungrier to keep our dignity than our health. Any solution to this problem has to be one that provides a dig- nified exchange," he said. "What retail does is that the person who has the purse holds the power. When the customer comes in, the customer has the power." Having completely abandoned his youth- ful ideal that it's wrong to make a profit off food, Rauch now sees free enterprise as the engine that has driven a worldwide de- crease over the past few decades in the number of people who are living in circum- stances of absolute poverty. "The history of mankind primarily is one of abject poverty," he said. "Over millennia, the his- tory is one of abject poverty and struggle." Business can lift people out of poverty, according to Rauch. "We all need to aim higher. Particularly in business, we have the opportunity here for something really magnificent, and we need to aim higher. One of the things that's an expression of that is conscious capitalism. There are a bunch of organizations working on the idea that business should be a real force for good," he said. "Those of us practicing the type of business, whether you call it con- scious capitalism or inclusive capitalism, we all need to demonstrate that business can be a tremendous force for good." Business shouldn't be only a way to make a profit, according to Rauch, who compares business' need to make a profit with hu- mans' need for air to breathe. "They're your biological need," he said. "That's not why you exist – the same way that air enables me to breathe and then go on to have a higher purpose." Two years into operations, The Daily Table is about 80 percent of the way to Rauch's goal of covering the business' ex- penses without philanthropic help, and Rauch has plans in the works to open a sec- ond The Daily Table store in Boston and then scale the idea up into a chain of stores in additional cities across the country. The addition of the second store and the effi- ciencies of scale that it will produce will cut the gap between expenses and revenues at the original store in half, according to Rauch. "We want to get to a spot where we're absolutely break-even," he said. "We may not get there, but we're going to get re- ally close." Bringing the operation towards that break-even point has required the same kind of attention to company culture that characterized Rauch's tenure at Trader Joe's. Rauch believes that a company whose cul- ture rewards risk and provides meaning and purpose for its employees has a better chance of financial success in the market- place. "The essence of great companies is culture. Culture is that DNA that no one can copy," he said. "It is how things really get done." A company's leadership sets its culture because people look to the boss to see how things should be done, Rauch said. "Cul- ture drives behaviors. Those behaviors then drive performance. Performance drives re- sults. If what you're concerned about is get- ting results, it starts right back up with you as the leader and the cul- ture you create." The successful com- pany culture encourages employees to take risks and even to fail. "Fail on purpose. Take risks, in- novate, fail around your purpose, and make sure that you are learning from your failures – that you are pushing the en- velope on things that you need to learn more about," he urged. "Knowledge is power. It's human nature not to acknowledge our mis- takes. When we do something that doesn't work, we always find a way to rationalize that it wasn't our fault. That's harmful for an organization." "Wise people learn from others' mis- takes," he added. "Fools have to learn from their own." GN "The idea is to create a business that can pay its own expenses without philanthropic help. Once you're sustainable, you're scalable." —DOUG RAUCH FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, THE DAILY TABLE