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GOURMET NEWS www.gourmetnews.com n JANUARY 2018 n GOURMET NEWS 8 0 Small Specialty Food Producers Find a Home in New Hampshire By Lorrie Baumann Mary Macdonald got just three weeks' notice that her business, The Discerning Palate, was about to lose its home because the facility in which she was making and packing Swine- heart's Signature Sauces, Old's Cool Wild Game Sauces and Our Local Table specialty food products had been sold and was closing. The other New Hampshire food producers who shared the space with her were out on the street just as suddenly. She and her husband Gavin responded by building Genuine Local, a specialty food production facility that functions as an incu- bator for specialty food businesses, a shared use kitchen, co-packer and the new home of her house brands. "We wanted to figure out how to make something that worked for the people who were also displaced," she said. "We found that not only did the people who were displaced by the other facility need a new production facility, but there was also a need within the central part of the state be- cause there were no other resources like this anywhere." Genuine Local opened for business on Jan- uary 2016 in a 1,800 square-foot former ware- house, and now has 125 to 150 products coming out of the kitchen from 23 different producers. "We received our final notice of occupancy on January 25, 2016 at about 10:00 in the morning," Macdonald said. "By 1:00, the first batch of sauce was in the kettle." In December 2016, Local Baskit, a meal kit subscription service owned by Beth Richards of Concord, New Hampshire, be- came Genuine Local's first graduate. Local Baskit had launched in June 2016 using Gen- uine Local's facility as the base of operations in which Richards packaged all her meal kits. As the business grew, she shifted her at- tention to customer service and recipe devel- opment, while Genuine Local took on assembling the meal kits. Then in December, Richards relocated her business to a space that will allow her to expand her offerings to include cooking and nutrition classes. "At lightning speed, she leaped and she landed," Macdonald said. Genuine Local, located in Meredith, New Hampshire, is in the middle of the state, about 40 miles north of the state capital in Concord and about 80 miles west of Portland, Maine, as the crow flies. It's equipped as a small- scale commercial kitchen with 40-gallon ket- tles, which is large for a catering kitchen but small for a production facility. "We expect that people will come in and work for a year or two, but then move on as they outgrow what we're here to offer," Macdonald said. "The group that I'm most excited about working with are all the specialty food pro- ducers who need to take the next step." The facility doesn't have a USDA license, so it's not for meat products, and there's no cold chain production capacity. "We don't do cheese, but we can pretty much work with anybody else," Macdonald said. "It's a very purpose-built facility, so it has a very func- tional footprint. All of the equipment is on wheels. Everything we have is semi-auto- mated, including the bottler and the labeler. It's all about being the bridge." The 23 producers who are currently shar- ing the space make a variety of products, in- cluding conventional hot pack products and a range of ethnic foods that include a unique West African pepper relish, Ruth's Mustards, Little Acre Gourmet Foods' condiments and Bleuberet's microbatch relishes and jams. Local caterers also use the facility. "Products coming out of here are in distribution throughout New England into upstate New York, as well as pushing down into New York City. We have one customer that's fea- tured in all of the Eataly stores," McDonald said. "We have another customer that's really happy being able to drive to every single store that carries their product, and that's where they want to be." "We have everything from one company that makes a northern Indian-style eggplant relish, and that's their only product, to Little Acre Gourmet, which is really pushing to ex- pand their line," she added. "I'm thinking that in three years, we're not going to be big enough for her, but we are for now, and we're very glad." The facility is also home to The Discerning Palate's house brands. They include Swine- heart's Signature Sauces, which offers seven flavors of handcrafted, small-batch sauces representing various styles of American bar- becue. "We got into the food business as a hobby gone wrong. The kids gave their dad a small smoker for Father's Day about 10 years ago," Macdonald recalls. From that begin- ning, the Macdonalds started competing in the barbecue circuit and developed their own sauces. "From there, people started wanting to purchase the sauce, and the company just grew," she said. Once they'd decided to pro- duce the first Swineheart's Signature Sauces on a commercial basis, they set up shop in a copacking facility that also rented space on an hourly basis. "It was historically a culinary training program run by the county," Mac- donald said. "It was set up as a catering kitchen that transformed into a production fa- cility, whereas ours was set up to be a pro- duction facility from the get-go." New brands grew up around that 2010 start, including Our Local Table, which offers a trio of onion relishes as well as salsas and spicy Peri Peri sauces, and Old's Cool, a line of three sauces designed for wild game. "They're fat-free and made with gluten-free ingredients with no preservatives or artificial flavors or colors," Macdonald said. Genuine Local is also home to Genuine Local's Bootstraps Program, an a la carte business development program that works by subscription and offers assistance with all the myriad problems that people have to solve when they're starting a food business: labeling and nutrition panels, licensing, mar- ket development and recipe development. "For regular business planning, we refer those out. There are simply not enough hours in the day," Macdonald said. "We have some people who are qualified to do a variety of types of production, and they're willing to work with people on a freelance basis, so we do make those types of connec- tions as well." "We developed that Bootstraps Program out of recognition that we'd never have been able to do what we've done without the gen- erosity of other people," she added. "It's frankly not rocket science, but there's no manual. We have a really strong commit- ment, with our focus on local, to help people take the next step." Making Customer Service a Cottage Industry By Micah Cheek Linda Kunz-Bayens, Owner of Cooking At The Cottage in Louisville, Kentucky, has made a name for her store by cultivating a kitchen class that is worth traveling for. The shop is best known for its cooking school, which draws students and date-night guests from hours away. "There are some other cooking classes in the area, and just re- cently we've had two new schools open up. Maybe when people are traveling for busi- ness, instead of sitting in a restaurant, they'll seek out the classes that are going on around town," says Kunz-Bayens. "They'll learn something and maybe feel less alone or awkward getting dinner alone. It's some- thing they can feel like they fit right in doing." The school offers culinary education on everything from the cuisine of Sardegna to classics from Uzbekistan. Kunz-Bayens brings in local chefs who specialize in these cuisines. "We're lucky we have a very di- verse community. It's just reaching out to different instructors, chefs, food truck oper- ators, restaurateurs, whether they be big or small, for people to be able to experience the cuisine and decide if it's something they like and ask some questions," she says. "This way they can come and try five or six things, hear the backstory of the cuisine, and decide if that's something they want to pursue mak- ing. And you've got the instructor there to say, 'Here's where you can source Viet- namese fish sauce,' for instance." Fans of Cottage cooking classes come from all different walks of life. Some people save up to make a big trip to the store for classes, and some with more disposable in- come will make it a weekly event. Some cus- tomers will travel up to two hours to spend a weekend in Louisville that includes Cooking at the Cottage. Kunz-Bayens can count on regular customers to take up about half the seats for classes, the rest being strangers who are looking to try something new. "We have quite a number of gift card sales. People will give a cooking class as a gift for a wedding or holiday," she says. "Maybe people who have come to date night want to come back and bring their friends or their bridge club, so they might come back with four more couples in tow. For some people, it's part of their regular entertainment." By all measures, the classes at Cooking At The Cottage have been a success. Kunz- Bayens builds on that success to lure those students to become shoppers too. Kunz- Bayens runs the retail half of the store with a focus on good old-fashioned customer service. Exceeding the customer's expecta- tions is the name of the game for Cooking At The Cottage. "We're willing to box or do whatever a customer needs, and if we have that product in our classroom we're happy to get it out and let them play with it," says Kunz-Bayens. "Unless it's something criti- cal, if they need a certain size baking pan and we don't have it, we'll say, 'Here, take this home and bring it back when yours comes in.' I haven't had any problem with that. I guess there has to be trust. They just leave their name and number. I think all of us hear all the negative things about people and it starts to change their view. People are amazed when you do something nice for them." To keep prices competitive, Kunz-Bayens leans toward hard-to-find items and buys in bulk. "Our solution to that is to cross-mar- ket them in the store and with cooking classes, and then also to offer them at the lowest price the manufacturers will allow, rather than having sales," says Kunz- Bayens. "Obviously you have to sell quite a few more than you would if you were doing MSRP, but people have learned to trust us. I'm hoping to build their confi- dence over time, so they don't have to con- stantly be price shopping. Just because we're a small independent doesn't mean we'll be priced higher." When organizing and reorganizing the Cottage, Kunz-Bayens pays special attention to how repeat customers will feel on their walk around the store. "You go to a store and you know where something is, and then they move it someplace. A lot of times I'll give up and leave instead of seeking it out," says Kunz-Bayens. "None of us have the time that we once did, we're trying to spend it wisely. If you're in a hurry, that might not be the time you want to look around and see what's there." Cooking At The Cottage also exceeds cus- tomer expectations with an in-depth newslet- ter. "We send a cooking newsletter out twice a month by email. It has recipes and tech- niques, as well as cooking class times," says Kunz-Bayens. "Instead of just saying, 'Here's the pots we're selling today,' that's just another person pushing stuff. But when you're giving them something, they look for- ward to it. We send close to 12,000 out twice a month, and these are not lists that we've bought; these are people who have asked to receive it. The average open rate is 25 to 28 percent. It's giving people something they would enjoy, and want to hold onto instead of just trying to sell them more stuff." For the future, Kunz-Bayens wants to make changes on multiple fronts. Bringing attention to the retail side of the business is a priority. "We're more cooking school with a retail shop. A lot of people have no idea that we have retail products in the store," she says. "So [we are] educating people that we're both, and that one doesn't diminish the other." Kunz-Bayens also wants to build up the digital storefront, saying that the Cooking At The Cottage website is due for an over- haul. "I think there might be three or four lit- tle videos of products that people have tried and recommend – we need to amp up the so- cial media presence," she says. "When you're working with a small staff, it's a mat- ter of finding someone to do it."