Specialty store shelves full of jams, sauces and salad dressings won't satisfy home cooks looking to explore Eastern Mediterranean or Southeast Asian cuisine. As home cooks dabble in new cuisines, they need to restock their pantries. Savvy retailers and their customers are discovering a new range of specialty condiments and snack seasonings that speak to popular global flavors.
The Spice Route
Whether for the novice cook or experienced professional, many cuisines require an assortment of spices and seasonings supplies for an authentic flavor. Take the nuanced spicing of Indian cuisines. Garam masala, a seasoning used in northwestern India, means warming blend, explains chef and cookbook author Raghavan Iyer. Because of the long dominance of northwestern Indian cuisine in the U.S. restaurants, he says, that seasoning has become synonymous with Indian cooking, but it is never used in the south of India. He created Turmeric Trail spice blends to give consumers the "balanced flavors" of India's regional cuisines. He differentiates his blends by roasting or toasting the spices in small batches. This produces a "finishing blend," which makes it easier for the consumer to experience Indian flavors, he says.
Spice merchant Anne Milneck, owner of Red Stick Spice Co., says she's seeing a deepening appreciation for regional flavors. "Folks are trying to capture flavors of the Mediterranean," she says. Milneck takes a novel approach to sourcing some of the 125 spice blends sold in her Baton Rouge, La., shop and online. "We identify as many local and regional food artisans as we can and get spice blends from them," she adds. Such artisans provide authentic tastes as well as consistency, not easily obtained when blending in store, she says. Red Stick Spice's Casablanca Blend is from a Moroccan artisan and Italian blends are sourced from a multigenerational Sicilian family.
On the online store division of Food52, Mediterranean, Indian and Persian flavors are also trending, says Christina DiLaura, VP of commerce operations. The Middle Eastern spice sumac and spice blend za'atar as well as a Persian lime curry rub from Oaktown Spice Co. appeal to their consumers, she says. The website recently featured cardamom, which DiLaura calls "the new cinnamon." Typically the team at Food52 will collect six to 12 sweet and/or savory recipes that feature an ingredient in novel ways to get people to think "beyond the international," she says. Cardamom recipes included a doughnut and maple glazed salmon. Matcha tea received the same treatment. The Food52 staff developed recipes using it in snickerdoodles and cheesecake which show off the tea's "vegetal freshness."
"We love working with La Boîte," says DiLaura of the spice company owned by French-trained chef Lior Lev Sercarz. "He really sources some of the best quality and he is brilliant at blending spices." The spice meister to chefs Daniel Boulud and Eric Ripert, Sercarz blends such exotic ingredients as limon omani, orchid root and seaweed into evocative mixtures like Ispahan for soups and stews. His B-Marion Bloody Mary blend includes juniper berries, cardamom and coriander.
New Asian
Asian ingredients do well for Food52 where they are positioned both as ethnic condiments and as everyday staples. "We tell a deeper story and how (consumers) can open their world to these ingredients," says DiLaura. For example, Food52 promotes Asian pantry staples such as fish sauce. "You can substitute it in soup for umami or add it to a little butter to a make pan sauce," she says.
Food52 supports this through its robust crowd-sourced website with recipes contributed by its members and editorial staff. The site has approximately 600,000 members and 4.3 million monthly unique page views, according to Haley Sonneland, who manages communication and press for the 6-year-old website.
"Heat is trending too," says DiLaura. The online retailer features a number of sriracha products, among them Barrel Aged Sriracha from SOSU Sauces in Oakland, Calif. It also sells sriracha powder, sriracha catsup and a sriracha margarita mix from Cocktail Crate in Long Island City, N.Y.
An eagerly anticipated entry into the new Asian flavor space is Ssäm Sauce by Momofuku Food Lab. Long a menu staple at David Chang's Momofuku Noodle Bar, the sauce is being released for retail sale this spring. Described as an "umami-rich" hot pepper sauce, it combines Korean gochujang with fermented miso, sake, soy sauce and rice vinegar.
Another fermented product line to watch for is from Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Cultured and Sauce, which makes probiotic chutney, mustard and salsa. The company's Chile Lime Cilantro Probiotic Salsa, a 2015 sofi finalist, is for "for someone who likes Japanese flavors," says co-owner Lauren Temkin. The fermented Bombay Curry Chutney, made with preserved oranges, ginger and turmeric, "wakes up the tongue," she says, and is "super exotic." Tempkin is planning to launch the refrigerated products nationally through foodservice channels. They are currently available through Whole Foods Market on the West Coast.
Go Greek
Traditionally, olive oil is the product most associated with international specialty food sales, particularly among boomer consumers, according to the 2014 Specialty Food Association's Today's Specialty Food Consumer report.
Weather conditions in 2014 nearly wiped out olive oil production in Italy, opening an opportunity for Greek olive oil at a time when Greek food is trending. Gaea, which buys olives from cooperatives and owns its own bottling plant in Western Greece, opened a U.S. marketing arm this year. (Previously its products were sold by an importer under the Cat Cora brand.) Most Greek olive oil and cheese is sold in bulk, explains David Neuman, who joined Gaea US as CEO earlier this year. The company is now offering its global Gaea branded products, varietal specific olive oils, tapenades, olives and other specialty ingredients to the U.S. market. Gaea's extra virgin olive oil stands out because of its "complex taste" from koroneiki olives that grow wild without irrigation, says Neuman, who previously worked for Lucini.
A certified master olive oil taster, Neuman is a proponent of retailer education regardless of the source of the olive oil. "Every year the olive harvest in the northern hemisphere is early November to January depending on the region," he says. During that time, buyers should ask suppliers about the harvest, receive samples of olive oil made from that year's crop and require suppliers to ship the same quality as provided in the sample. "Buyers have a responsibility to check the olive oil and decide whether it is something they really want to work with," he notes. Faced with so many products, he recognizes it is difficult for the retailer and the consumer to choose. He encourages retailers to support their customers. Quality olive oil should taste "pleasant, green, ripe or fresh," he says. If the product tastes "rancid, mechanical, gummy or grubby," customers should be encouraged to return it for a fresh bottle.
Stocking the Store
Products essential in the popular cooking classes taught at Cooks Warehouse sell well, says Wendy Allen, cooking school director of the 3-unit Atlanta-area chain. Pan-Asian, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese and Korean cuisines are popular cooking-class subjects, she says. But the stores resist stocking ingredients that can be found at a nearby Whole Foods Market or from an ethnic food store. "If we can get in on the front end of the product, we do pretty well with it," says Allen. They sell the locally made Chinese Southern Belle line of Asian sauces, which are popular especially when its maker, Natalie Keng, demos or gives classes in their stores. Saffron, Spanish rice and paprika as well as the harissa, preserved lemons and pomegranate syrup used in Persian cooking complement their limited international ingredient offerings.
This echoes the approach taken at Coastal Cupboard in Mount Pleasant, S.C., where cooking classes that feature Latin foods are popular, according to the store's chef-instructor Bryan Breland. The edited line of specialty ingredients stocked in the store reflects locally made items such as Bulls Bay Salt Works and Holly Smoke Smoked Olive Oil, both made near Charleston S.C., he says. Such ingredients can be incorporated into many types of cooking classes.
Merchandising
Sampling, demos and cooking classes help the sell-through of specialty foods especially those used in unfamiliar cuisines. The Healdsburg Shed, a 2-year-old market and café in Healdsburg, Calif., calls itself a "modern grange" and offers unusual kits for Japanese and Italian cooking. The Japanese essentials include Koda organic white rice, California-harvested kombu seaweed, locally produced tamari, a cookbook and ginger grater.
Bundling specialty foods into kits offers customers a way to explore a cuisine, says DiLaura at Food52, which sells a deluxe hot sauce kit, a DIY carne asada kit and a kombucha kit among others. Kits include everything a novice needs to get them started; then consumers can "evolve" from there, she says.
Cook's Warehouse promotes its cookware and food lines through special events such as the Regional Indian Cuisine and Cultural Bazaar it hosted in April. Food stations highlighted a dish from each of five regions in India. Local chef Archna Becker used different spices through cooking demos. Traditional garments were on display and outside vendors offered henna tattoos. "We are able to take it (Indian cuisine) to a different level," says Allen, emphasizing what is popular in different regions of India and why.
Although many specialty food retailers stick with tried and true ingredients – Italian olive oils, Spanish saffron – many new product lines speak to today's global food trends. Increasingly popular U.S.-made spice blends, condiments and sauces as well as imports ease the task of cooking challenging cuisines at home. And, as many retailers have found, when consumers are shown the multiple uses for foreign commercial seasoning blends through recipes, in-store demos and classes, they are more likely to make a purchase.
source: gourmetretailer
source: gourmetretailer
