‘GRADE A BEERS’
Cingari family ShopRite collaborates with Stamford brewery to make exclusive brand
When Cingari Family ShopRite Vice President Tom Cingari Jr. jokingly pitched Half Full Brewery owner Conor Horrigan about a beer collaboration, the pair was not sitting in a conference room; they were coaching baseball together.
The two are coaches for their sons’ baseball team, and Cinagri said that they had started talking about Cingari’s ShopRite brand, Grade A.
“As a joke I said, ‘Hey, I wonder if you could make me a beer?’” Cingari Jr. said. “And [Conor] was like, ‘Absolutely.’ ”
From there, Cingari said it was about eight months before the product ended up on shelves. First, he and other members of the ShopRite team went to a tasting at Half Full Brewery to figure out what kind of beers they wanted to have in the collaboration.
“We all voted on what we liked about each one and we combined those ideas to create both the Golden Ale and the Grade Above IPA,” Cingari Jr. said.
The team then started thinking about packaging. Horrigan at Hall Full Brewery had collaborated with local artist Chris Sainato on projects before, and so they tasked him with creating the labels for the two beers included in the project.
The Grade A name on both beers comes from the Cingari family’s original stores, Grade A Markets, that Cingari Jr.’s grandfather first opened back in the 1940s. The Cingari family and Grade A Markets joined the ShopRite cooperative in 1991, with their 11 stores becoming ShopRite stores but staying under the family’s ownership. Cingari Jr. said the Grade A legacy was at the forefront of his mind when developing the packaging with Sainato.
“We met with Chris and we told him all about the brand, what the brand means and our history,” Cingari Jr. said. “We basically told him that we wanted the label to somehow be an ode to our original logo, and so he took the colors and put a newer spin on it and created that print. He was able to get that out of our heads and onto paper, and he created a pretty cool-looking label.”
Cingari Jr. said that the beers have been well-received by community members. He said that the product has performed especially well in the Stamford area where Half Full Brewery is located and where many residents are familiar with the history behind the Grade A logo.
“I don’t think a lot of supermarkets are doing their own collaborations of beers for their store so it was kind of an interesting thing and a new, fun thing that we were super excited about,” Cingari Jr. said.
Cingari family ShopRite stores plan to have the beer collaboration on shelves for as long as possible, and Cingari Jr. also said the company plans to continue working with Half Full Brewery to bring out more Grade A beers, including seasonal brews for summer, fall and winter.
He also said that the company is interested in working with other community business’s and plans to pursue collboations outside of beer in the near future. Right now, he said that ShopRite is talking with Stamford-based Longford’s Ice Cream about another exclusive product.
“It is a win-win for us to support a local company and also have those items available for us in the store,” Cingari Jr. said.
The two beers from the collaborations can be found in all 11 Cingariowned ShopRite stores across Fairfield and New Haven counties.