What is going on in grocery retail?

This is a thought-provoking piece on innovations in grocery retail. 

Farmhouse Market in particular caught my eye. It's a shop in Minnesota that lets customers use a key code to enter and shop 24/7. You can buy groceries alone. There is no on there to help, no on there to watch you, no one there to check you out. For me it flips the downside of zero staff—the fact that no one can help you—into an upside—you can shop anytime you'd like. Many large grocery stores let you shop 24/7 too, but having the option to shop in a smaller shop close to home with better food and less carting around through endless aisles...it sounds compelling. It also upends the Amazon Go grocery test where they hung a zillion dollars worth of cameras watching every move in the effort to let you shop without cashiers. That model is crazy expensive and freaks many people out that they are turning the act of buying cereal into Orwell's 1984. Instead, this couple installed a fifty dollar lock. And Big Brother isn't watching.

One emotion that staff-free retail invokes is trust. Do we believe customers will steal if left unattended? I lived in post-communist Slovakia for a year just after the Berlin Wall fell. The way retail worked there was utterly devoid of trust. In many shops you had to wait in a queue and ask for someone to get your item for you. To buy some noodles I would wait, then point at a box of pasta behind a counter and ask for someone to get it for me. Part of the justification for this nonsense was communism's mission to maximize employment. Jobs for everyone, jobs doing everything. A job getting you a box of pasta. A job handing you a piece of toilet paper at the bathroom (I'm not making that up). But another reason was trust. Since everything was owned by the state, people probably felt about as bad stealing as people do cheating on their taxes in America. A little wouldn't hurt, right?

I haven't thought about what that experience meant to me for years. Then I read this article on Chinese ecommerce. It is fascinating. (I'm sorry it's behind the New Yorker's firewall, if you'd like a copy I can send you a PDF.) It had loads of interesting news. For example, if you're like me and thought Amazon's drone special on 60 minutes was a PR stunt intended to deflect holiday attention from the working conditions described in an undercover Mother Jones article, you may be surprised to learn that they were just copying the Chinese who already use delivery drones. Who knew? But it was the author's own experience coming to America that hit home for me. She is a Chinese immigrant and described shopping for the first time in America after, like me in Slovakia, having to queue-and-ask shop in China. Here is her description of the marvel:

I can still remember the first visit my mom and I made to a Stop & Shop in New Haven, Connecticut, soon after we moved to the U.S., in 1992. I interpreted the unguarded aisles of open shelves as a sign that everything was free. I’d never heard the word “supermarket” before, and it seemed likely that “super” indicated a market where no money was necessary. My mother was awed that store employees, instead of trailing our every move as they did in China, seemed indifferent to our presence. How had shoplifting not bankrupted the establishment? What sort of society would allow such a risk? 

I had always thought of the Slovak model as weird. Here was someone describing how she felt the model I grew up with was weird. I took our get-it-yourself shopping for granted. But a hundred or so years ago, we shopped in America like they did in Slovakia, like they did in China. We lined up in a queue and asked. It made me realize that, of course, duh, retail changes. In high school I had a job at a video rental store. (It was there I watched Better off Dead about a hundred times.) That job no longer exists—for anyone. People don't rent videos from stores. Blockbuster used to employ almost 60,000 Americans. Where did they go? What do they do now?

Of course retail is going to change. Here is a mind boggling list of recent grocery innovations alone. How else will it change? Will it go backwards, like it's done recently adding delivery, something our grandparents took for granted? What will it add? What will it eliminate? Will we eliminate  the next queue — lining up to have people take our money? It seems the answer is inevitably Yes. There are many places, like CVS, where we line up and a machine takes our money. Or there are shops like Apple —or Zingerman's Mail Order, during our warehouse sale — where almost anyone walking around can take your money. There's no need for a single queue. Amazon wants their invisible app to take your money at Amazon Go. Surely that's just a stage, too.

But all that payment stuff, in context, seems like small potatoes now that I think about it. That's just the last part of retail. The money. There is so much more. One of the cornerstones of Toyota's lean operation tools, kanbans, came from how American supermarkets replenished shelves. That idea, born in retail, transformed manufacturing around the world. What else will come from retail? What else will come to retail?  How will we react to it? 

Recent reading

This is essentially how our strattu is made.

We buy meat like this.

Not like this.

Recent reading in batches

The benefits of batching the news.

The benefits of incrementalism.

The benefits of grocery shopping more frequently.

What kind of sandwicher are you?

from @mattomic 

Recent reading

Fast food "meat" is probably scarier than you think.

Many environmental footprint studies are flawed. This one appears to be pretty good. It shows the carbon footprint of a loaf of bread. You might be surprised at what's the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas. Hint: it's not transportation.

UPS taxed air and we cut back on shipping air. The same logic applies when you tax food — check out the eye-popping results of Philadelphia's soda tax.

Ibérico pig immigrants, coming to America.

Recent Reading, Food Visuals

A look at the scale of modern American farming.

What 2,000 calories looks like before you eat it.

Michael Pollan on labeling

 "I think we should have a lot more transparency about food, not less. I think we should label food if it contains pesticides, but nobody is talking about that. It's really peculiar that if you're not using pesticides, if you're organic, you have to pay to put a label on declaring you aren't using pesticides. It should be the other way around."

For my money Michael Pollan one of the most considered food thinkers of our time. His insights are profound but also realistic, sensible. This comes from a brief interview by New York Magazine's Grub Street about his new Netflix documentary Cooked, which I'm watching now. If you haven't read his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I highly recommend it. 

Recent reading on meat

The lack of small, local slaughterhouses is often cited as one of the obstacles getting in the way of you and me buying affordable meat from small, local farmers. There's a bill being proposed to change slaughterhouse oversight rules in a way that would make it easier for them to get off the ground. The article quotes from some people we work with like Will Harris and Greg Gunthorp.

One argument against raising animals for meat is that it redirects calories to animals that we could otherwise eat. Except...

"...most of the feed that livestock eat is not edible by humans. Globally, just 18 percent of animal feed is made up of grains or other crops that people might otherwise eat. The rest is crop residues, grass, and waste from milling grain and other food processing. And so, despite the inefficiency of converting calories to meat, animals are able to give humans access to energy that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise."

Many more interesting points in the article Can meat ever be environmentally friendly?

I swear this was called chicken stock last week.

Recent reading

Many Danish hog farmers are running industrial-sized confinement farms but they don't use antibiotics like we do. Here's how they do it.

What if we put salad in our vending machine and made it cost less than a candy bar? Hat tip to Betsy B.

Whose government does the best at issuing nutritional guidelines? It sure ain't ours. Maybe... Brazil?

Recent reading, chicken edition

 

First the depressing story. A farmer that opened up their farm to reporters and was transparent about how he raises chickens. Now his only customer, Perdue, will probably shut him down for it.

But not all chicken stories end badly.  People complain about pricey food being elitist and out-of-touch. Being a merchant of that kind of food I know that can be the case (hopefully not the case with much of what I sell, since there should be a good reason for the expense). But here's an example of how higher prices have made chickens live better lives—and helped prevent antibiotic resistant organisms from growing. The story is the government asked chicken farmers to go antibiotic free. But because antibiotic-free chicken sales grew 34% last year many did it before the deadline.

Who are our oldest food makers?

Sam Edwards' ham house in Virginia peanut country.

I've been working on a spread for next spring's catalog about the oldest companies we work with. Some have been around for decades, some for centuries. We even have one that's a millennium old this year. It's been an interesting experience to think about them more deeply, bringing up lots of questions. Like, why are they still around? More importantly, how are they still around and making great food? How much did they have to change along the way? Who decided what to change and what not to change? How did they transition when their founder left the business? I ran across this article about why there are so many old companies in Japan that explains how traditional firms like Nintendo manage succession (these days it's often done by the owner adopting an adult into the family to run the business—a surprise to me).

Some of our venerable food makers and the year they got in business:

1014 Castello di Cacchiano olive oil in Tuscany

1731 Amarelli licorice in Cosenza

1880 Usinger liverwurst in Milwaukee Wisconsin 

1898 Rizzoli anchovies in Parma Italy

1900 Cope's corn in Rheems Pennsylvania

1900 Roi olive oil and sauces in Badalucco Italy

1903 Raye's mustard in Eastport Maine

1909 Broadbent cured meats in Kuttawa Kentucky

1925 Koeze peanut butter in Grand Rapids Michigan

1926 Martelli pasta in Lari Italy

1926 Edwards cured meats in Surry Virginia

1947 Benton's cured meats in Madisonville, Tennessee

 

Why aren't we as critical of design as we are of food?

"If you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.”

Jony Ive, Apple's chief designer
( iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch)

 

Following Comté from Fromagerie No. 25 to Fort St. Antoine

Sebastian Muller

Fromagerie No. 25

Frutière a Comté des Hospitaux Vieux

Place de la Marie

The truck leaves at 3 am to collect milk from ten producers across three villages. Each farmer has about forty Montbeliard cows. This pickup run is called Ramassage. The old method, called La Coulée, where producers delivered their own milk, is practiced by at just a few frutières of the thirty-four in the area. By AOC rules, the milk must be processed within twenty-four hours. May is the big milk month.

Fromagerie No. 25, built in 1920, is run by one man, Sebastian Muller. He makes twelve wheels a day seven days a week, using 1.6 million liters of milk per year. It’s about average for a cheese maker that delivers to Marcel Petite, but small in the scheme of things. A big Comté fruitiere makes 5 times as much. The work for the cheese maker, like that for cheese makers everywhere, is endless. Sebastian can arrange for a few days off only if he reroutes his milk to another fromagerie, or gets another cheese maker to substitute for him. He extended his wet arm for us to shake. He works very fast, with few words to us. He’s probably not used to company.

The milk truck is hooked up outside in the small parking lot on the hill overlooking the valley. It has a long hose and the milk is pumped in. Inside, where things are wet and smell sweetly ammoniated, the milk is heated by a radiator and delivered to one of two big copper vats. Rennet is added, curds form, and Sebastian cuts them with a rectangular wire mesh, kind of like a big hard boiled egg slicer. This releases water. The temperature raises to 55 C, drying and cooking the curd. When the curd passes the test—the cheesemaker puts his hand in and no curd sticks to it—it's ready to pump overhead into the cheese molds. 

Comté cheese press

Until now the curds have been treated gently. The next process is brutal. A big vacuum hose lifts the curds ten feet in the air and shoots them fifteen feet across the arched ceiling, unceremoniously plopping them in one of four mold machines. Pressed for eight hours, held in their mold until the next morning, they’re ulimately brought to “The nursery” where they practice being cheese for three to four weeks, washed daily with morge, a brine made of water and the scraped crust of older cheese. It’s the mother culture of the cheese maker, like a bread starter is to a baker, one of the things that gives a cheese from a single fromagerie its unique flavor. The baby cheeses are—ironically bigger now then they'll be when they "grow up", since they lose water—are stored on spruce shelves, which the skin of comté enjoys as it turns to rind. The shelves are rough cut, harvested when the sap has drained from them. You can see thick, raw grains across the boards. That lets a little bit of air pass under the cheese as it rests; wheels don’t stick.

Marcel Petite’s trucks visit every month to pick up young wheels.

Fort St. Antoine

Marcel Petite

Fort Lucotte de Saint Antoine

                                  

“You feel like you’re coming to the center of the cheese world: of industry, quantity, quality.”

Jason Hinds, Essex St. Comté

The road leads up through the village, past some hills and a small forest. The fort is built underground, alone and invisible, marked only by a ten foot tall door built into a hill. You park and enter by walking across a moat. The smell is warm butter and pine. You’re ushered up to the lunch room first, for espresso, the cheese halls flash by on your left. A few of the staff are reading papers, eating cheese, drinking a 1998 Cotes du Jura, part of which has found its way into a plastic water bottle. Windows open onto the Mont d’Or, leaves umber and rust, but the grass is still very green. It’ll be that way until first snow in December. 

Cheeses arrive from the fruitières regularly, 80% of which are in the mountains, along the Swiss border. The hills were forested ten centuries ago, now cows graze on them. First stop is the top level, La Maternelle, another nursery. Wheels are doused with sea salt to draw out more water, washed with cool water to keep the “wrong” bacteria from being active. Today there are about 25,000 wheels. They’ll stay there for 6 months when they’ll come down and join the 35,000 wheels in the lower rooms. 

Fort St. Antoine's main room, the Church of Cheese

Lights, camera—but nothing prepares you for entering the Church of Cheese. The main room of the fort, once a covered garden, holds 9,000 wheels of comté, each three feet across, seventy pounds, rising twenty feet high under a cathedral ceiling. The wheels look like rounds of wood or stone, in various stages of growth, their surfaces sometimes smooth, other times mottled, molded, warty, covered in patterns that look like lichen, rust, sandstone or bird shit. Absolute silence, once in a while broken by the whir of little electric hand carts. Or the lonely cheese washing robot that haunts the aisles. Little rooms are off to the side. They used to hold 52 soldiers each, now they store 900 wheels of comté.

I'm escorted by the affineur, called the chef de cave Claude, and his other half, Phillipe Goux, head of sales. Claude is dressed in white jacket and white hat, with nothing more than a note pad and cheese iron as tools. Mr Goux, born in Jura, eats comté two or times a day. He prefers younger cheese.

The fort has its own micro climates. There are no heaters or humidifiers, just the bricks and the earth outside them. Grass grows in some areas. Claude taps, touches, tastes. He’s trying to figure out where to send the cheese next. To the dryer room? The warmer one? Much of his life is devoted to deciding what’s best for a wheel, 60,000 decisions, one kind of cheese, endlessly repeated. Each wheel will only be with him for a year or so but more will come. He’s developed a strange coding system to keep track of each wheel’s journey. He scratches it the edge of the wheel with his iron. A little window. A cross. Codes for him alone.

We taste thirteen cheeses. The routine is always the same. Claude walks along the aisle, guided by the codes. He picks one wheel, tilts it out of its cubby, rubs its top quickly, in circles. Tap tap tap the top, insert the iron on the edge of the wheel, turn, remove. Smell. Pause. Take a piece, between thumb and forefinger, pass around. Everyone follows, on cue. Take a bit of paste, warm it, replug the whole, use the paste as a cement to seal it.

Dominic Coyte, Essex Street Comté’s selector, grades cheeses 1 to 5 for flavor, texture, longevity. Anything above 3 is fair game for him to buy. Sometimes a cheese that was asleep a month ago comes alive. FIFO doesn’t work, sometimes a November cheese is ready before an August. We don’t touch the cheese, only taste. If Dom chooses a wheel Claude marks “ESSEX” on the side with his iron.

The conversation is spare and clear. “I like it. It’s not as dry.” Maybe it seems that way because of the language barrier; we’re English speakers, they’re French. Maybe it’s because I’m with a bunch of Brits.

No 25. August 2005. Sweet. Full. Sour. Vegetal. Spicy at the end. Meat. Roasted, especially onions. Cream. Nut. Cocoa powder. Caramel. Wet.

No 4, Oct 2005 Lovely. Nutty. Full mouth.

No. 7. September 2005.  Dried prune. chocolate. Long flavor. Made by Christophe Parent in Narbief, Frutiere 747.

Marcel Petite, the man, started aging "just" 2,500 cheeses in 1966. He waged an uphill battle trying to change local cheese tastes from warm, fast-matured cheeses with big holes inside (like Swiss Cheese) to longer-aged cheeses with no holes, aged in cooler climates. Today Marcel Petite, the company, houses 60,000 wheels in Fort St Antoine, 80,000 wheels in another facility in Grenoble. Fort St Antoine, built in the late 1800s for the Franco Prussian wars, failed spectacularly when it deployed as part of the Maginot line in World War II. The French government sold it off, now it matures the country's best cheeses, most from the Jura's top fifteen mountain fruitières. 

Recent Reading

Old things are new again: subscription home delivery of milk—and other local food—is on the rise.

Microlending, meet micropayments. Square is starting a business loan program where you pay off the loan pennies at a time—with each customer credit card transaction.

There's no such thing as cheap food without consequences. The scary story of slave labor shrimp at Costco.

Food waste, guest opinion

I recently posted an article about Doug Rauch who's creating a restaurant based on "expired food." Robert Lambert, our source for marmalades, fruitcake and fruit syrups wrote a note I thought was worth sharing. Plus I love Robert and a good rant now and then, especially when it's true.

The piece about using expired food hit a lot of buttons for me, and forced me to comment. I’ve read that as much as 1/3 of our food is wasted because of those damn expiration dates. I was at my local market last week when the woman who’d been checked out before me came back into the store and said her bag of potato chips was expired. What the fuck could possibly happen to a potato chip?

At home I actually prefer expired cream, as it thickens and gets more like clotted cream. I rarely use eggs and can keep a carton for weeks, with no ill effect. I grew up in a time before dated foods—as the man says, you simply smelled it. People now seem to think "Best if used before ____. Use after ____ and it will kill you." An English friend says she only refrigerates her ketchup and mustard in America, because her friends here would be horrified if they saw it in her pantry, but she’d never do that in England. What on earth do they think is going to happen to ketchup and mustard?

The one question I’m asked by customers more than any other is, “How long will it last?” I never know what to say—it’s like, well, it’s preserved, that’s the whole point, it will last indefinitely, that’s the function of the process. It will be good for a very long time, probably years, until it isn’t any more, and at that point anyone with any brains should be able to tell. Nothing is going to suddenly turn into poison and kill you without warning. And as the man said, all cases of food poisoning are from unexpired foods.

It really is a case of overly zealous bureaucratic safeguards making people stupider. Nature builds in all the warnings you need, and it is our responsibility to be able to recognize them. I used to make a Coconut Dark Chocolate Sauce, stopped about 4 years ago, but kept a couple of jars in the closet. I opened one the other night, and while I know you might dispute that it was ever any good to begin with, it was unchanged, and delicious, and we had it for dessert. Had it been covered in mold and smelled bad, we probably wouldn’t have.

Do cheese and tuna have anything in common? What happened when I selected tinned tuna at Ortiz.

Decades ago chefs used to select their preferred tuna batches from the factory at Ortiz, Spain's highly esteemed fifth generation tinned fish titan. Cheesemongers do this with cheese, in fact it's a specialty of some exporters like Neal's Yard Dairy and Essex Street Cheese. But it's something that hasn't been done for decades with tinned fish. Last fall I visited with my colleague Brad to see if we could revive the practice.

We landed in Barcelona on a sunny November Sunday, a couple weeks after the six month tuna season had ended. It was a four hour drive northwest to Getaria, a small town on the Bay of Biscay, where the weather got progressively more Irish along the way: wetter, mistier, greener. Tasting was 9am Monday, a fifteen foot table in the break room set up with twenty-six batches of tuna and sardines. We had a round of Nespresso pod coffees and went to work.

The first question on all of our minds—including the folks from Ortiz, who, being in their 30s and 40s, had never batch tasted either—was "Can we taste a difference?" That got answered quickly. The second tin we tasted was very different than the first. That continued throughout the morning with some batches being good, some excellent, and a couple extraordinary. There is a big difference between batches of tinned fish.

The main differences in flavor were complexity, balance between sweetness and brine, and length. The best tunas had a range of high and low notes, were never just sweet or just salty, and had great length of flavor. Color foreshadows flavor: if a tuna was rosier, it was often better tasting. Texture played a smaller part on these tins, just made this summer, but over time it has a much bigger role. The older a tinned tuna in oil, the softer and more luxurious its mouthfeel.

The fishing boats in Getaria.

One thing that you may be asking is, "What constitutes a batch of tinned fish?" It's a little more complicated than with cheese, where a batch is a single day's make, usually a mix of last night's and that morning's milk. A tuna batch is a single catch from a single boat, brought in at one time and sold to one buyer. That's how fish are managed in the Biscay auction market and Ortiz stays faithful to the one boat one batch cooking, which means the tin you get from Ortiz is traceable back to a single boat on a single day's catch (that said, a catch may last longer than a day, but it comes from a single shoal of fish). It may take several days to cook a big catch and, since the fish in it are different sizes and different ages, there's bound to be more variability than with a single batch of cheese.

We decided on a single catch of bonito, caught that summer, but brought examples of nearly every tin we tasted back to Michigan so we can taste again and confirm what we thought. A second round of tasting is one of those steps that I've learned, over time, to be important when I'm making a big flavor decision. Sometimes, out on the road where everything may be a bit more exciting, I can talk myself into liking something that, second time around, doesn't live up to the hype. 

We're going to cellar a few thousand tins, too. I tasted some two and three year old tunas at Ortiz and pretty much everything I likede about a young tuna got better when they aged. (This is only true for good tuna stored in oil—water-packed tuna gets worse with age.) The good thing about aging tuna is its a lot easier than aging wine. You don't need a special cellar with specific humidity and temperature. Tuna in a tin is practically indestructible. Our aging room is going to consist of boxes stacked on a pallet stored high up on the racks in our warehouse, wrapped in plastic with a note that says "Don't Touch till 2016!"

Our first selected tunas will arrive this May.

Scenes from La Boqueria in Barcelona

What do cheese and tuna have in common?

When I visited Spain last fall I had lunch with the brothers who own Ortiz, the source for our amazing tuna. They represent the fifth generation of the family running the company and they both grew up in the business. We ate at a seafood restaurant (naturally) and I remember the hake cheeks (!) we're really good, cooked in olive oil, scattered on a wide platter. The restaurant edged up to a walled, brackish tidal inlet that snakes through the town of Ondarroa, along the Bay of Biscay. Fishing boats were parallel parked along it. Across the water we could see the back side of the plant we'd just visited. It's Ortiz's oldest fish factory (they now have seven) and it's still downtown, right in the village, squeezed on main street between cell phone shops and cafes and hanging laundry. The family still maintains an apartment on the top floor.

Lunch was a bit rushed because we had to get to La Mancha that evening. We were going to see the cheese making at Finca La Solana, the farm that Essex Street Cheese Co. gets its Manchego. We were also going to taste batches of cheese to select for export. Batch selection is a process that was pioneered in its modern form by Neal's Yard Dairy in England. The idea is that, since cheese is made every day, every day is like a different vintage of cheese. Every vintage tastes different so you want to pick the best days. There differences result from different weather conditions, different food for the animals, a different starter and so on. With farmhouse cheese that's made naturally, all the variations add up to enough of an impact on flavor so that anyone can taste the difference between batches. I'm not exaggerating; I could bring you two different days of Manchego and no matter how much experience you've had tasting cheese I guarantee you would be able to taste a big difference between them. Companies like Neal's Yard Diary and Essex taste many batches of cheese and select certain days (called "makes") for their customers. In doing so they catch the high peaks of flavor when they come once in a while and avoid the off-flavor wheels. The results are cheeses that are more consistently better tasting.

When I described the cheese selection we were going to do one of the brothers lifted an eyebrow. He spoke some Basque to his brother (totally incomprehensible) and then told me that what we were doing sounded a lot like what chefs used to do with their tuna. When he was a young man he remembered them visiting the Ortiz factory to taste with his father and select a particular batch of tinned tuna they liked most. All the following year, whenever the restaurant ordered, only tins from that batch of tuna were delivered.

I asked them, "Does anyone do this any longer?" "No." "Could we do it?" "Sure." 

I said, "See you next year!" as we bolted for the car. I've been excited about the trip ever since. Tomorrow I fly to Spain to taste this summer's and fall's tuna batches. More to come.

Recent reading, entrepreneur's edition

Why Uber is worth billions. What's Uber? Uber is one of a number of new car-calling and car-sharing services. In a place like Michigan where many people have a car — or more than one — it may not seem like a huge deal. But in cities and, I think eventually in the developing world, it's catching on like crazy. Still just tip of the iceberg in the coming sharing economy.

"Which part of your project is hard?" A key question to ask when you're starting a business.

Subscription model grocery continues to spread its wings. The new twist: bringing farmer's market style foods to you once a week.

High tech, high return silicon valley is investing like crazy to transform low tech, low return food.