NATIONAL GROCERY CHAIN BOOSTS LOCAL PROVIDERS
Grocery chain helps incubate startup restaurants, food manufacturers
T he Orange Crunch food truck got a big boost for its new business in 2014, when it partnered with a then-new Whole Foods store in Westminster’s Bradburn Village neighborhood.
“It absolutely helped us catapult our catering services,” said Leshner Del Rosario, who owns the Filipino-themed food truck with his wife, Sarah. “People were calling us and Whole Foods, sending us messages through our Facebook page or e-mails asking if we were still there months and months down the road after our short stint.”
The experience was also beneficial for Whole Foods.
“That’s what got the idea sparked,” said Tom Rich, vice president of purchasing for the giant natural foods retailer’s Rocky Mountain region. The idea Rich referred to is the Friends of Whole Foods program, in which the stores develop partnerships with local chefs and other food companies to allow the outsiders to bring their unique businesses inside Whole Foods stores.
“We started becoming a lot more aware of opportunities to partner beyond just bringing in local ingredients and produce,” Rich said. “It was more of a completed meal.”
Those opportunities include Biju’s Little Curry Shop and Beyond Burger Bar, a burger and shake space that showcases Beyond Meat’s vegan burgers, in the Whole Foods store on Pearl Street in Boulder. The Whole Foods store in Longmont, which opened last week, includes a space for Pressery, a Westminster company that specializes in coldpressed juices, broths and drinking vinegars.
Altogether, Whole Foods has about 15 partnerships in the works in its Rocky Mountain region.
Future plans include a Biju’s in the Whole Foods Tamarac in Denver, set to open early next year, and the company also is working to add a Yellowbelly Chicken to its lineup. Whole Foods also is working with a not-yet-named Denver restaurant to bring its ramen to a Whole Foods store in the mountains.
“It’s a good fit with the weather in winter, providing something warm and enriching,” Rich said.
The partnerships bring benefits to Whole Foods and to the individual businesses. For Whole Foods, the arrangement can bring a unique restaurant, perhaps even a destination spot, into a store, adding value for the shoppers and giving them a place to linger. Partnering with Whole Foods offers the little companies access to expertise and a venue that brings in a steady stream of potential customers.
Obstacles and perks
When Whole Foods agrees to partner with a restaurant, it requires the vendor to meet guidelines including antibiotic- and hormone-free meat standards and rules about animal welfare. Rich said it can be difficult for some companies to make it work. For example, Whole Foods started a conversation with a sandwich shop, but it used meats cured with nitrites, which didn’t meet the retailer’s guidelines. The sandwich shop didn’t want to change, and so the deal didn’t work out.
“We’re just sharing what our quality standards are,” Rich said. “We’re not trying to push them on people.”
Some businesses may be concerned that making the changes will be difficult or too expensive. To remove some of those obstacles, Whole Foods offers help with sourcing ingredients up to its specs.
“We ask them to sign an NDA (nondisclosure agreement). Then we open our books and share with them information on our costs,” Rich said.
If the company is able to reach an agreement with Whole Foods, it can use Whole Foods’ purveyors and purchase food at the same cost Whole Foods does.
“It’s a true partnership,” Rich said. “It doesn’t work for us if it doesn’t make the partner happy. They are a lot smaller and have a lot more at stake.”
Whole Foods and its partners share the profits. Although the store won’t release specifics, it says the arrangement is favorable in the direction of the partner.
Bringing the curry
When Biju Thomas opened Biju’s Little Curry Shop in Denver’s River North neighborhood two years ago, he immediately began talking to Whole Foods about getting some Biju-branded products, including spices and flat breads, into stores. They then began working on a partnership that would bring the fast-casual restaurant into the store. Biju’s food was already a good fit for Whole Foods, with its high quality ingredients and lighter Southern Indian approach that doesn’t use cream or butter.
But it took time to get everything in place, Thomas said.
“The Whole Foods process takes a little time to get your product through,” he said.
Also, because he was opening a second location in Denver’s Berkeley neighborhood, he made the decision to do his food prep in his own kitchen and transport it to Boulder in a refrigerated truck rather than using Whole Foods’ kitchen facilities.
“Because we have our own production kitchen, we have a lean operation,” Thomas said.
He said the partnership has worked out well. The restaurant sells about 200 bowls of curry a day in the Boulder store, which meets Thomas’ goal. The store also carries Biju’s spices and will offer others as they come to market. He said the Boulder location means that locals don’t have to drive the 30 miles to Denver to get Biju’s food.
The curry shop works well for Whole Foods because of its authenticity.
“There’s nobody I know of who can make (Indian) food better than him,” Rich said. “He learned from his mother. Why should we try to duplicate any Indian food?”
Thomas said the restaurant inside the Tamarac store in southeast Denver will help him reach an even larger audience.
“Tamarac is way more central (than the Boulder store),” he said. “People from all over the place are visiting and traveling through.”
He hopes to eventually open restaurants in Whole Foods stores in other states. Texas and Washington have expressed interest.
Thomas said the partnership helps his business emphasize that its food is well sourced and healthful.
“If the curry shop is in Whole Foods, it must be a quality product,” he said.
Juices and vinegars
Pressery, Whole Foods’ latest partnership, got its start in 2012, with an idea for a cold-pressed juice, which was then much less common, founder and CEO Ian Lee said. The company continued to innovate, adding drinking vinegars and bone broths to its repertoire.
Probiotic soups that include a fruit gazpacho and a coconut curry with carrot are in the works. Pressery’s juices have been on Whole Foods’ shelves from the beginning and are now distributed in about 20 states.
In addition to its more familiar products, Lee said the Pressery inside the Longmont Whole Foods serves kombucha on tap and nitro coffee.
Lee was an early maker of drinking vinegar, which some see as the next kombucha.
“There’s a tremendous amount of health with vinegar, but obviously it’s something so difficult to consume, given its potency and acidity on its own,” said Lee, whose solution was to mix his coldpressed juices with coconut vinegar.
“We we were in marketplace over a year ahead of everybody,” he said.
Lee credits part of his innovative approach to feedback he has received from customers at farmers markets, and he is looking forward to a similar experience with shoppers in the Whole Foods store.
He said most companies choose between having a brick-and-mortar store and a shelf product. With a product on the shelf already, he jumped at the chance to be in the new Whole Foods store.
Vegan burgers
One company with a showcase at Whole Foods that isn’t local is California-based Beyond Meat. Its vegan burgers have received national recognition by food critics for their texture, juiciness and color.
Founder and CEO Ethan Brown said one reason he was happy to put the Beyond Burger Bar in Whole Foods is that the company helped Beyond Meat increase its sales. The burger now is sold by 11,000 retailers.
“We wouldn’t be in business without Whole Foods,” Brown said of the business he started in 2009. “It was unusual. I was a very small company, but they didn’t exert their leverage, they sought to help me.”
He said Rich immediately grasped his concept of putting Beyond’s vegan burgers near the meat products.
“We said we have to put this new product … in the meat case. That’s where it belongs. Consumers can pick between meat and plant,” Brown said. “Tom said, ‘We’re going to do this.’ ”
The burger bar was Whole Foods’ idea, Brown said. “They’re there to push the edge on eating well.”
Keep on truckin’
The Orange Crunch food truck, which helped start Whole Foods’ program, is still going strong. The company is selling its first truck to build a second, larger truck.
Del Rosario said the partnership helped the family business to have higher standards of quality and customer service. In the past year, he and his wife have stepped back from the business to welcome their first child into the world. Del Rosario is planning to attend culinary school to enhance his skills.
For the couple, who started the company with their 401(k)s after being laid off from jobs in the financial services industry, the partnership with Whole Foods, however short — two weekends in December 2014 — proved fruitful.
“They’re top-notch professionals,” Del Rosario said.