Gourmet Business Fine Foods Quarterly January 2014

Welcome to the first issue of Gourmet Business Fine Foods Quarterly, which will feature expanded coverage of the specialty food industry four times during 2014. We start out with our Winter Fancy Food Show preview issue, featuring some of the new products that will be available to sample at the upcoming show in San Francisco. Once again, this issue will be printed in our signature style and distributed in the show hall, so be sure to get a copy before they’re gone.

All around me, I see signs that specialty foods are a growing business for so many different types of retailers. I noticed during a holiday-gift-buying mission to TJ Maxx that its specialty food assortment was even broader than in years past, and included many well-known brands with a reputation for creating fantastic products. More importantly, the prices were indicative of the value that the store’s customers have grown to expect from the retailer, but it wasn’t a fire sale either. I suspect that the buyers at TJ Maxx have discovered that specialty foods are a great impulse gift item, and they don’t need to give up too much margin to have the products fly off the shelves.

A holiday tradition around our household is to make our pilgrimage to the local purveyor of great food and artisanal cheese, Formaggio Kitchen. Formaggio has its own cheese cave, which James Mellgren and I have had the pleasure of touring in the past, that allows the store to offer cheeses that you can’t find anywhere else in America. When I arrived an hour before closing on New Year’s Eve, I was pleased to find that the line for the cheese counter was still out the door (I have learned my lesson to leave the ripe cheese errand to the last to minimize the confluence of original odors in my car – a lesson learned dur- ing our team’s two-week drive through Western Europe with a trunk full of ripe cheese courtesy of our first stop, a cheese factory, where romantic no- tions of stopping on the roadside for a quick cheese feast quickly turned to the reality of a cheese smell strong enough to allow us to find our car in a parking lot ... blindfolded!). But, the thing that struck me as such a positive sign for our industry is that we weren’t lining up to get a discounted buy on cloth-bound cheddar, everyone seemed to be interested in trying something special and unique, like the $43-per-pound Plaisentif from Italy I brought home.

Both positive signs for a prosperous 2014!

David Spencer

Publisher, Gourmet Business 

President, HousewaresDirect, Inc. 

dspencer@gourmetbusiness.com