Bristol Farms 30th Anniversary

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Bristol Farms Celebrates ree Decades: Quality Runs rough It In the crowded Southern California food marketplace, Bristol Farms has winnowed out a very successful niche over the past 30 years. Its 14 stores, which are concentrated in Los Angeles County but as far north as San Francisco, are meccas for those who are serious about their food. And that’s because Bristol Farms is serious about its food. at commitment to quality runs through every department at Bristol Farms, whether it’s produce, deli, prepared foods, bakery, meat, seafood, dairy, grocery or the in-store cafes that operate in seven of the stores.

From the executives at company headquarters in Carson to store directors to department staff to part-time cashiers, excellence in quality and service are the name of the game at Bristol Farms, and President and CEO Kevin Davis is mentioned time and again by those in the know as the driving force behind that commitment to excellence.

Davis spent a number of years with Ralphs Grocery Co. before embarking on his journey with Bristol Farms about 16 years ago. He and the company have weathered a number of ownership changes, but

each successive owner seemed to understand the uniqueness of the enterprise and kept the company, and its leadership, intact. The company went private again two years ago through a management-led buyout in concert with investment partner Endeavour Capital.

Since then, Bristol Farms has been able to invest in some long-awaited store remodels that have yielded nice returns in both sales and goodwill with area residents and loyal customers.

The early years Two men, moving toward retirement, sold their high-end meat business supplying restaurants and butcher shops. But they weren’t quite ready to stop working

altogether, so they decided to try their hand at retail, believing that if they sold fresh, high quality meat, merchandised in the fashion of a butcher shop, they could build a customer base. us, Irv Gronsky and Mike Burbank started Bristol Farms in a space once occupied by a chain store in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., in November 1982. “ey always thought the grocery stores could do a better job selling meat if they would throw sawdust on the floor and put 20 butchers behind the counter with fresh meat and not wrap it in plastic wrap on a foam tray. ey thought if they presented meat in a better, fresh environment, with knowledgeable people behind the counter, that people would migrate there like they would a high-end butcher shop. So as a hobby they opened up a store in Rolling Hills Estates here, and it took off and did very well,” recounts Davis. e duo recruited a produce expert early on, so meat and produce were in the spotlight in the early years. Eventually the store added a full complement of grocery departments, plus an adjacent café.

During the next 14 years, Gronsky and Burbank opened two more stores—one in South Pasadena and one in Manhattan Beach.

In 1996, they sold the three Bristol Farms stores to Kidd/Kamm, an investment firm, when they were ready to “retire again,” Davis says.

Oaktree Capital was a mezzanine investor in the Kidd/Kamm deal and eventually took control. Oaktree executives approached Davis, then senior VP of marketing at Ralphs, about coming to Bristol Farms.

It took periodic interviews over a six-month period for Davis to make the move to Bristol Farms, but by that time billionaire investor Ron Burkle had purchased Ralphs and the future there had become a bit more unclear.

Davis says Oaktree brought him in to make Bristol Farms “scalable”—to build a management team and set a course to grow the business.

“I came to Bristol for the entrepreneurial opportunity to do something unique, very highIrv Gronsky (right), who coend, specialty, and to kind of put my fingerprint founded Bristol Farms with on something and do it the way I think it could Mike Burbank, with his son be done,” he says.

David.

Next owners: Albertsons and Supervalu e company had grown to nine stores when Oaktree Capital decided to sell

Important Events in Bristol Farms History Nov. 21, 1982: Bristol Farms is founded by former meat packers Irv Gronsky and Mike Burbank with the opening of a store in Rolling Hills, Calif.

March 4, 1983: Bristol Farms rolled out its first private-label tortilla chips, selling them for 99 cents. Three months later, Bristol Farms salsa was introduced.

Nov. 24, 1985: The second store, this one in South Pasadena, opens.

Jan. 27, 1991: The Manhattan Beach store opens, featuring a catering facility and cooking school.

It is the first store built from the ground up.

Feb. 1, 1995: Gronsky and Burbank sell Bristol Farms to Kidd/Kamm, an investment firm. On the same day, Lou Kwiker is named president.

Kwiker is former CEO of Wherehouse Records.

April 8, 1996: Kevin Davis joins Bristol Farms.

Davis joins the company from Ralphs, where he was a senior marketing executive.

August 1997: Oaktree Capital takes control of Bristol Farms in an equity restructuring event with Kidd/Kamm.

June 14, 1996: Kevin Davis becomes president and CEO of Bristol Farms.

Aug. 5, 1998: The Newport Beach store opens.

This location, the company’s first in Orange County, is near the Fashion Island Mall.

Sept. 1, 1996: Bristol Farms’ first distribution center opens in Bell, Calif.

Nov. 6, 1996: Westlake Village store opens. The store is located in the Westlake Promenade, the first major regional development for Rick Caruso.

Feb. 4, 1997: Bristol Farms’ Long Beach store opens, serving customers in the Long Beach and Belmont Shores areas.

Aug. 1, 1997: The South Pasadena store is remodeled. More parking is added, the retail space is expanded and the café is relocated.

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April 21, 1999: Bristol Farms opens its store in Hollywood following the purchase of the former Chalet Gourmet Market on the Sunset Strip.

areas, opens in the former Chasen’s Restaurant. Bristol Farms retains the original high-back leather booths in the worldfamous restaurant and incorporated many of the design elements that earned Chasen’s a place in “Old Hollywood” lore.

March 8, 2000: The Westwood store, the company’s eighth, opens following the company’s acquisition of Gibson & Cooke Market on Westwood Boulevard near UCLA. July 1, 2000: Bristol Farms’ website goes live, launching online communication with customers.

Nov. 15, 2000: The Beverly West Bristol Farms, serving the Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles

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“

“Back in the day and still to this day, when I hear people talk about Bristol Farms, either a customer or a competitor, meat and produce are really the two departments that continue to be the ‘bellwether departments,’ I guess you could put it.That is tough business to earn, but we’ve done it.”

—Doug Poling, Senior Director of Nonperishables and Bakery

Bristol Farms to Albertsons Inc. in September 2004. “e private equity guys needed to get money; they churn businesses every five to seven years. Oaktree Capital had grown us and done a great job and it was time to sell,” Davis says. “When Albertsons bought us, they were very smart and they understood that we were a different business than Albertsons. So they kept us as a wholly owned subsidiary; they kept me and all my team here. ey really didn’t change anything at all for the negative here. ey left us alone and they literally said that it’s a one-way revolving door. You can come in and take anything you want and you can go, but we are never going to force things on you because we don’t want to mess up your business. at’s a testimony to their foresight that they didn’t.”

In 2005, Bristol Farms acquired the Lazy Acres store in Santa Barbara, which kept its own banner and natural/organic concept intact.

In June 2006, Albertsons sold portions of its business, including Bristol Farms, to Supervalu. (e rest was sold to a separate group of investors.) Right after the acquisition, Bristol Farms opened its Westchester and La Jolla stores, followed later that year by the stores in San Francisco—the first in Northern California—and Palm Desert.

Supervalu took much the same stance as Albertsons with regards to Bristol Farms. “ey said, ‘we only want to own you because we think you’re a great company and we can learn from you how to do perishables and how to go to market and some of the ways you do, but we don’t want to mess it up.’ So again, we’re going to leave you in charge, we’re going to leave your people alone, we’re just going to provide services to you that you want, and if you don’t, don’t take them. ey were very generous and fair with us, and the only issue was that they didn’t grow us as much as we might have grown had we been owned by somebody else because they were having internal problems with the assimilation of their own merger (with Albertsons).

“Honestly, I can’t complain about ownership, whether it was private equity ones or the major chains that bought us like Albertsons and then Supervalu buying them. ey never made us do anything that wasn’t advantageous for us and they trusted our judgment in that regard, so much so that when I asked them if they would give us a chance to buy the company in 2010 they did and they let us buy it back when they realized there wasn’t going to be any opportunity for them, with all they had going on, to continue to grow our format, and why would they want to hamper our growth and independence if, in fact, we could muster the capability to buy ourselves away from them, and they let us do that.”

Davis and a number of other executives partnered with Endeavour Capital to take the company back in October 2010, and some changes are readily visible.

“We have spent money on completely remodeling our Rolling Hills store—which was our first store—wall to wall, and it’s like a brand new little store. It’s beautiful,” Davis says.

The company’s Newport Beach store also was in line for a remodel, partly because of the hotly competitive market it operates in, and it was completed this summer.

One other store is in line for a remodel, but “everything else is current and fresh and beautiful and been recently remodeled,” Davis says. “Customers are seeing a re-emphasis on their own local store and the positive trends that come out of that in terms of products and our own employees’ selfimage when they have a newer, better, fresher store to sell from. It does feel local, and we did communicate that now we’re local and independently managed and owned once again. The halo effect of being privately held and local is a good thing.”

Kevin Davis in the produce department of a Bristol Farms store. e stores are best known for their meat and produce.

What about the name?

There are at least two possibilities about where the name Bristol Farms came from.

Doug Poling, senior director of non-perishables and bakery, joined Bristol Farms about six months after the first store opened and personally knew the original owners, Irv Gronsky and Mike Burbank.

Gronsky did live on Bristol Street in Brentwood, Poling says, which probably solidified the choice of name. But the more powerful motivation, he believes, was Gronsky’s passion for yachting.

The term “bristol” comes from the name of the British seaport. Because of its reputation for quality and dependability, the terms “bristol” and “shipshape” both became associated with something being in excellent condition.

“Irv was a yachtsman all his life. He loved the water, loved boats,” Poling recalls of Gronsky, who died in July 2011. “‘Bristol’ essentially means ‘well kept, clean, everything in its place.’ Everything’s just got to be kind of perfect, and that was really what Irv and Mike set in motion back in 1982.They were both kind of pioneers at that time in providing an environment and demanding an environment where everything was perfect.”

Sept. 16, 2002: The company’s centralized facility—including corporate offices, warehouse and Central Kitchen—opens in Carson.

July 20, 2006: Another Albertsons is acquired and converted to the Bristol Farms concept and banner, this one in La Jolla, near UC-San Diego.

Sept. 21, 2004: Bristol Farms is sold to Albertsons and becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Boise, Idaho-based Albertsons.

Sept. 28, 2006: The first Bristol Farms in the Bay Area opens in Westfields Market Center Mall in downtown San Francisco.

Nov. 8, 2005: Bristol Farms acquires the Lazy Acres natural food store in Santa Barbara.

Lazy Acres becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Bristol Farms.

Oct. 18, 2006: The Manhattan Beach store is remodeled; sales floor updated to increase product variety.

April 14, 2006: The Westchester Bristol Farms opens in a former Albertsons store that was acquired and converted. The store is near Loyola Marymount University.

June 2, 2006: Supervalu acquires Albertsons and retains Bristol Farms as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Jan. 8, 2007: Bristol Farms opens in Palm Desert in a former Lucky’s Market that was acquired. It represents the first desert area location for Bristol Farms.

Aug. 1, 2008: Scan-based trading (SBT) implemented; systems put in place to facilitate its expansion.

Nov. 15, 2008: Hollywood store remodeled to

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expand store’s overall variety.

Oct. 29, 2010: Bristol Farms goes back to being privately held in a management-led buyout with Endeavour Capital.

Jan. 10, 2011: Bristol Farms launches its redesigned website. It’s more interactive for visitors, featuring a blog, a Healthy Living & Seasonal Produce information section and a recipe database. A mobile version of the website was developed in 2012.

Aug. 1, 2012: Metropolitan Markets in Seattle becomes a sister company to Bristol Farms under the Endeavour Capital/Good Food Holdings umbrella.

Nov. 7, 2012: The second Lazy Acres banner store opens in Long Beach. It is a conversion of the Bristol Farms store that opened in 1997.

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Rolling Hills Store Gets Long-Awaited Remodel Customers have continued to embrace the Rolling Hills store over its 30-year history, and in early 2012, after more than a decade of trying to get a remodel done, the polished-up, changed-up Rolling Hills store was unveiled, to rave reviews.

“We’ve seen the customer count climb, we’ve seen the average transaction climb. Most importantly, the people in the community—who are really close to the store because it was the original Bristol Farms—really embraced the change,” says Geoff Babb, store director. “ey wanted it for so long, and once it started and once it was completed, they really just embraced the effort that we put forth at this store, and it’s showing in our sales.”

they were asking for a remodel. e process began right before anksgiving, and the open house was in January, Howard adds. “It was a push to get it open, but we did.” e original store footprint was preserved, but the insides were rearranged to make the most of the space.

“We moved both deli and cheese to the front of the store, and we’ve seen significant increases in comps in both departments, but specifically cheese. Cheese has continued to just grow. e cheese industry I think over

A holiday remodel Remodeling a store during the busy holiday season might seem counterintuitive, but it worked.

“For us it was just a great opportunity to let the customers know that we really are remodeling the store; we’ve been talking about it for quite some time,” says Sam Masterson, EVP of operations, who explains that the holdups were partially due to the ownership changes in the 2000s. “We weren’t sure what to do under different regimes—the Albertsons and then Supervalu ownership.

Now that we’re a stand-alone company, we believed this project to be important enough to take on. We thought about delaying it until after the holidays but we thought it’s such a great message to send during the holidays, when you get that extra traffic. We thought it would be really fun to just get it going and we’ll make the best of it during the holidays. e employees really pulled that off quite successfully.”

Bristol Farms’ senior director of foodservice and Central Kitchen, Steve Howard, grew up in Rolling Hills and started his career at the original store.

He says, “e store had been there for about 50 years (under other banners and then Bristol Farms)…so it just needed some tender loving care. e community, let’s just say, was aching for a remodel. ere are three grocery stores up there on the Hill, us being one of the three, and Below is a photo taken before the remodel; at right and above are after.

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the last 10 years has really become, with food shows and cookbooks and such, that people are really exploring and getting outside the box with cheese. It’s not just your Swisses and Cheddars; there are so many great different cheeses from around the world. So moving that up front was really a good move for us,” Howard says. “e aisles got wider; we were able to actually expand on our center store, our grocery department,” according to Babb. “at’s where we’ve seen a huge increase in sales.”

Masterson adds, “We added literally thousands of new SKUs.” All the fixtures and equipment on the sales floor were replaced, “and we used the most energy-efficient lighting available with extensive use of LED lighting, and efficient refrigeration design.” e company also reused as much as possible.

“We used many elements from the original store, including some of the premier décor pieces that were themed based on kind of a local farm feel,” according to Masterson. “We refurbished those, added some new accent colors and also added a lot of local signing that really drew this store into the community further.”

Names such as Lunada Bay appear in the produce and dairy areas to give the store a local feel, which is an important part of every Bristol Farms store. “e residents of the Palos Verdes peninsula, they really consider that store to be theirs,” he adds. “It’s definitely a local store for them and a local brand. Great employees at that store that worked through a very difficult environment for the four months when the store was under remodel. ey did a great job continuing to serve the needs of our customers there.” e store’s café, which has entrances from both the parking lot and from inside the store, also has seen an uptick in sales following its facelift. It kept its same footprint.

“We made it kind of like a retro coffee shop, and we’ve seen coffee sales go up over there,” Babb says. “Honestly we’ve almost seen the sales double in the café from the beginning of the year to present day. And we extended the hours.”

He says that the cafe has become a gathering place for neighbors, church groups, business groups and others.

“It’s like a brand new little store,” says Davis.

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At Bristol Farms, People Are the Difference When Bristol Farms again became privately owned in October 2010, the change was not really that noticeable to shoppers. But things did begin to happen behind the scenes that showed management’s dedication to building back the “family” roots of the business that had been covered up a bit over years of being owned by investment firms and chain grocers.

In 2011, President and CEO Kevin Davis saw the need to re-establish some of the company culture that had been lost during the transition, says Yolie Pepin, senior director of human resources.

“If you know our history, we have been bought and sold so many times that it was creating, as you can imagine, some unease with some of our employees, so we started with a small group of people we called a ‘culture club.’”

“We changed our mission statement that had been in existence since the beginning of Bristol Farms. At the time it applied but it was not really meaningful in today’s world. So we were able to come up with one that focused on our positive aspects, which is our food because we all agreed that we’ve got the best food around. We ultimately came up with the mission statement that says, ‘To entice your passion for food beyond the everyday experience.’

“We took the best of the old world and we combined it with the new world, and this is what we came up with. So now, as we go about our business, what we try to do is infuse passion into every aspect of our business,” Pepin says.

Where does that passion come out? rough the people of Bristol Farms, which led to another core value of Bristol Farms: People Are the Difference.

Adam Caldecott, SVP of marketing, explains it this way: “In any company, the products and the décor and the design are all things that can be imitated and copied, but the cultural aspect and the people that make up that culture are what

can separate one from another one.

“From the people side, I think that Bristol Farms has developed a family-oriented culture where we’re all relatively accessible to one another and very dependent upon one another. at culture is created partly by the full-service atmosphere that we have; we’re all kind of a little bit more servants, to a larger degree, to one anYolie Pepin other and to our customers. I think that’s ultimately the difference in the success of our business and our format.”

“A lot of that is just based upon the culture,” Caldecott continues. “Our growth hasn’t been rapid enough to destroy culturally what was created with three stores.

I think Kevin (Davis) did a good job of continuing to foster that culture as we have gotten bigger and bigger and gone through a few acquisitions. He’s done a really good job of continuing to try and keep that piece within the business. To a large degree, I think, that is the success.”

Finding, and keeping, people One of the challenges in any business is finding employees who will be assets.

Doug Poling, senior director of non-perishables and bakery, says that Bristol Farms uses all the traditional methods of finding employees, like posting ads, but the company also has found its own employees to be a great source of leads. Poling himself joined the company because a friend worked there. at was almost 30 years ago.

“What happens is you have one person who works for this family called Bristol Farms, and they love the experience so much that they literally recruit their own friends and family into the organization,” Poling says.

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“And our retention is phenomenal,” he continues. “ere is just a tremendous amount of legacy in terms of people that have been here for a long time because it’s a fantastic culture, fantastic family to be a part of. Our HR department now has all the electronic job postings and all that good stuff to go hire folks, but I think at the core we are our own best recruiters.”

Bristol Farms has a higher proportion of full-time employees than most grocers as well as a lower turnover rate. It’s not unusual to find employees with 10, 20 or more years with the company.

Pepin joined Bristol Farms in 2000 after spending 19 years at Ralphs, starting as director of HR. “We’ve got really dedicated employees,” she says. And Bristol Farms does what it can to foster that dedication. “e benefits package is good. We have really a hands-on relationship with our employees,” Pepin says. “We have our Employee of the Month, Employee of the Year, those kinds of programs, and they feel we’re on their side. We are partnering with them.”

All the top executives, from Kevin Davis on down, make it a point to be accessible to team members, which creates a great feeling of family.

Frank Mota, HR generalist, says, “Every year at the corporate office we help prepare the holiday meals that are ordered at the stores. We go into the freezer to pack these meals, and everyone from the corporate office is down there packing meals. You have the VP of operations and the president, Kevin Davis, right there with you in the freezer at 5 in the morning working alongside you. You just can’t find that anywhere else. at just makes you want to give that much more effort and work that much harder for the company.

“People talk about their ‘open door policy,’ but we breathe it, we live it, here at Bristol Farms,” Mota says.

Mark Taylor, employee services manager, says of the executive staff, “It’s not intimidating for me to go over and talk to one of them. I really appreciate that because I’ve worked in other companies where when the top people came in you were scared to death of them. I think it keeps that, if you will, family atmosphere. ey’re not too big to have a conversation, and this is not always about work.” is environment seems to breed passionate employees.

Adds Pepin: “We have people who are passionate about what they do. If they are prep people, they are passionate about prepping it. If they are meat people, they are passionate about all aspects of meat. ey know recipes; they can tell you how to cook meat, they can tell you how to store meat. ey can tell you everything about it. Just as a group, the culture is very passionate. One of the things that they needed to be again reminded of was how important their passion, what an important role their passion plays, in ultimately, making sales.

“So we try to focus that passion. From the hiring standpoint, we’re looking for people who have passion. As long as they have a passion about something, we can see that they can translate that passion into our products.”

Sam Masterson, EVP of operations, says, “Every company I have ever had the pleasure of working with or for, everybody touts the employees as their most valuable asset, and I have found, generally speaking, that is just talk. But at Bristol Farms I have found that we walk the walk. We treat our employees truly as our best assets, and we believe that happy employees will in turn equate to happy customers.”

Concludes Pat Posey, VP of sales and advertising: “It really is the people that makes us different.

Everybody who works in our stores I think of as technicians as opposed to someone you’ve hired off the street.

Most of the people that work for us, it’s a life path for them.”

Pat Posey

Davis believes in empowered employees From the beginning, when we only had three stores, our employees were called “owner-partners.”

(And we actually had stock in the business until we were bought by Albertsons in 2006.) We encouraged the employees to feel and to act like owners. We wanted them to be empowered to do the right thing for the customer, and we very much wanted the people in our stores to be craftsmen and customer service agents, if you will, rather than just employees that transfer from store to store without anybody caring where they were or they just put in the hours and punch a time card and walk away.We wanted them to be proud of their departments and be proud of the service and the quality of the ingredients and know all the products. It literally takes years.

When I was a kid in the grocery industry, in two weeks I probably knew all the cheeses in the cheese department because it was just the national brands that everyone is familiar with. But at Bristol Farms we carry more than 350 specialty cheeses, and it might take someone two years to know all the products—where they’re from, what the ingredients are, if it’s goat’s milk or cow’s milk, the difference between a one-year aged cheese and a three-year aged cheese and what they’re good with and how you eat them and what you pair them with and all those kinds of things because they’re unique products from all over the place.

It’s much more an artisan business, and we wanted to embrace and empower employees to have unique knowledge about the products they sell and to become, in essence, masters of their craft, so that they not only are proud of what they do, but that they also look at their business and their customers very much as a proprietor or a private owner would.

In that respect, we don’t have any leased departments at our stores. If we run a coffee shop it’s our coffee shop. If we run a sushi department, we don’t have third-party sushi guys coming and going.

Department by department, that’s the case.

I don’t know as much about the products in each category as each of the buyers or the merchants would, and I don’t try to. If I were in a traditional consumer packaged goods environment you kind of order off the list, you know.They let you know they have a new flavor of sports drink coming out and you simply write it in without ever tasting it because you know they’re going to put all kinds of money behind it and everybody’s going to sell it.You’re just another distribution point for the product. For us, it’s not that way at all. We hand-pick the products. Our buyers help decide what we’re going to carry, but even the store has a lot of input into which products from the assortment we sell they can put in their stores.

An example of that is we have more than 2,000 wines that we distribute from our own warehouse, and while there are mandatory ones, traditional wines everyone would carry, the store gets a lot of input into which ones they supply the customers in their store with—what those customers truly want rather than what some buyer arbitrarily decided they should have.

Being in the business now over 40 years, I’m 58 years old, I’m really having fun from the standpoint of delegating to young, aggressive people that want to know their craft. They aspire to learn more about their products than they’re probably allowed to do in the environment that they came from, if they came from a traditional grocer.The people who come to Bristol to work, basically, are those people that really want to become a craftsman and really don’t just want to be a number in an aisle that just stocks and goes home and doesn’t really know about the products or care about them. They really want to take pride in what they do, and they’re very proud of the way the product looks and the freshness and the reputation that they have.

For me, I’m more of a coach and cheerleader. I make the decisions about where we’re going as a company and where we’re going to build new stores, but I don’t tell them how to go to market, I don’t tell them what’s in the ad, I don’t tell them what prices to charge for the products; I let my teams make their decisions themselves. I simply try to make sure that everything we do lives Kevin Davis up to the standard that was set by our predecessors when they first founded the company in terms of quality and service and make sure that we keep balanced in that approach because that’s our unique difference.

We really can’t be everything to everybody in today’s world.We really need to be very unique and specialized and true to what our customers expect us to be.

I think it gives people a sense of pride that they don’t have (other places). If they go home and they don’t feel a sense of pride, then we haven’t done our job in giving them the autonomy they need to make decisions themselves.That’s what we try to do and I think that’s why we have so many people that have been here so long. We have many, many people who have been here 20 years or more with our business that have grown up here and have stayed and matured and looked for more opportunity with us because the chains are changing ownership…They get bought by somebody else and it’s all a leveraged game of how much they can charge the customer and how many stores they close. You never hear about the employees being an asset in that discussion. They always consider the stores and the buildings the assets, and for us, it’s the opposite. It’s the employee that is the asset, and I would argue that I could take everybody out of a building and take them across the street to another building and somebody could take over our store and I would transfer all my customers to the new location because it’s the people that are our asset, not the buildings and not the equipment.

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Bristol Farms Promises Customers: Great Taste Just Got Better Bristol Farms is known as the place where “foodies” shop.

And it’s no wonder, with gourmet take-home meals, fresh soups made in the company’s own Central Kitchen, fresh-picked produce that comes off the truck and goes directly to the stores, an expansive wine department in every store, specialty cheeses and deli favorites as well as the freshest meats and seafood available…You get the picture.

But the company has made strides during the past year to make its stores more appealing than ever to an even wider range of shoppers. Its “Great Taste Just Got Better” campaign that launched in October 2011 was Bristol Farms’ way to communicate to shoppers that it was offering “More Organics, More Natural, More Local and More Value.” e stores added not only more organic, natural, local and gluten free products, but more specials and more everyday values on key brands in all departments. Signs and shelf tags alert customers to these items.

To make sure the message was clearly communicated, President and CEO Kevin Davis, EVP Sam Masterson, SVP Adam Caldecott and Pat Posey, VP of sales and advertising, put on a “road show” that traveled to all 14 stores to “talk everybody through the program so everybody was on board with what we were trying to do. We weren’t trying to change Bristol Farms; we were just trying to alter the direction a little bit and bring better taste through better quality foods,” says Posey. “We’ve always had the besttasting food, but we wanted to make sure we had the best tasting, good-for-you food.”

Davis describes the change as “migrating our product mix to more closely align with what customers are asking for nowadays.”

He estimates that about 40 percent of the items in Bristol Farms stores are either natural, organic or gluten free today.

“We’ve gone to a much more fresh, natural, local and organic footprint in terms of our store image and the products we sell,” he says. “Quite frankly, we have gotten rid of a few of the products that were just kind of passé or that are available at Costco or Walmart so they’re not so special anymore.”

He says the changes have elicited “a great response from our customers, who feel that the mix of products is more contemporary and competes more directly with Whole Foods and Sprouts and Trader Joe’s and those kinds of folks, but you can still buy Cheerios and Wheaties and Best Foods mayonnaise and Dreyer’s ice cream. So it’s been a very good fit for us. But we did it under the umbrella that ‘Great Taste Just Got Better’ because we’re really all about the experience of the taste. We think a lot of

e “Great Taste Just Got Better” campaign is communicated at the shelf.

“We identified all the different SKUs that met the different categories and we implemented a shelf tag program based on the attributes,” says Adam Caldecott, SVP of marketing and merchandising. “If you go up and down the aisle, you see bibs that say gluten free, organic, naturally better to identify and distinguish the products that we have added into our set.”

This is what each sign the shopper finds means:

SALE Extraordinary Savings on “items that you purchase every day” in weekly farm FRESH ads.

VALUE “Value” stands for a quality product at a reasonable price.

These items are guaranteed Bristol Quality flavor at an everyday low price.

ORGANIC The highest quality organic products available with Bristol Quality taste.

products that the natural foods stores sell, they try to convince you that they’re good for you so you should choke them down even if they don’t taste good. Our attitude is if it doesn’t taste good, we don’t want to sell it. It’s really about food as an experience that’s fun—if it’s healthy and good and also tastes good. We’re all about the taste.”

While Bristol Farms offers highly affordable wines under a “10 Under 10” program—the stores always sell 10 wines under $10 a bottle—an even better program is “Club 90,” Davis believes.

“That’s wines that are under $20 that rate over 90 on Wine Spectator’s wine list. To us, that is even a better deal, to know that for $20 you can Adam Caldecott get a wine that rates over 90. That’s an example of how we try to go for quality and taste and freshness first.”

Posey adds, “We know people have a choice out here, especially in Southern California. ere are so many stores. But we thought it was important for us to communicate why we’re better and why it’s good to pay a little bit more sometimes to get a better quality food.” e SKU rationalization process Bristol Farms went through—taking out items that had artificial ingredients, fillers or stabilizers, for example—meant that the company took out about 4,700 items and brought in about 8,000 items, according to Posey, for a net gain of more than 3,000 items.

Caldecott started out as a meat cutter at Bristol Farms, and the meat department has been committed to carrying natural meats for the past 15 years.

“We’ve been proponents of no antibiotics, no hormones and additives and fillers and extra water weight to increase the poundage of the product and make more money. We’ve stood against those things as we have succeeded in the meat departments; the meat department has been a very successful aspect of Bristol Farms,” he notes.

Davis adds, “Everything that we can control, we do. All of our meat is raised to our specification and it’s all raised in California.

We don’t buy boxed beef on the open market; we even cook our own shrimp. We buy shrimp and then we cook it to order here in our NATURALLY BETTER Central Kitchen because it only takes 90 secMeets Bristol Farms’ guidelines for wholesome ingredients, no aronds in boiling water. en we ship it to the tificial sweeteners, additives, or colors, for a “healthy, natural and stores daily to fill their need for fresh shrimp.” honest product that just simply tastes better and is good for you.”

Caldecott says that Bristol Farms buying the natural/organic Lazy Acres store in Santa LOCAL Barbara in late 2005 reminded him of “some of Locally grown or sourced for freshness and quality. Bristol Farms the original elements of Bristol Farms—maksupports local farmers and food producers in California to “ening things from scratch, making things from sure fresh, sustainable, superior quality foods that just taste the simple ingredients that things used to be better. Buying local also stimulates the local economy, essential made from. ” for maintaining a growing and fruitful society.”

He was among a group from Bristol Farms that spent three months at the Lazy Acres GLUTEN FREE store, “looking at how they’re operating and Whether for medical reasons or for someone looking for a beginning to see some of the trends that were healthier alternative, Bristol Farms offers a variety of Gluten Free foods that taste great. going on on the natural/organic side. When I got into my position of overseeing merchandising, I began to try and focus us a little bit MARKET BUY more on the simple ingredients. One of the big Where savings and freshness come together. “Oftentimes ‘fresh’ means more money but not at Bristol Farms. We work things that a lot of the natural/organic stores with local farmers and fishermen to bring you the best values have against them is the fact that yes, the inon the freshest food available. When we get a good deal, we love gredients are simple, but the products themto pass it along to our customers! Big on freshness, low on selves are often simple and don’t have the price.” flavor profiles that the foodie consumer has grown to expect. So what we have tried to FRESH FROM BRISTOL’S KITCHEN focus on with the campaign is really going back Fresh from Bristol’s Kitchens—”Just like homemade! We prepare to simple ingredients but still delivering the our food from our kitchen with the freshest, highest quality intaste through the spices and the flavorings that gredients available. When it’s this fresh, it just tastes better.” we use to give the consumer better quality product at the end of the day. at’s probably the biggest aspect of the whole campaign—just really taking a hard look at the products and upgrading the product selection and assortment and getting back to simple ingredients with foods that really do actually taste good.”

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With ‘Farms’ in the Name, e Produce Has to Be Fresh One way to make sure your produce is fresh is to have a very small warehouse. some of these things, we just won’t compromise on.”

Instead of keeping produce for days in a large warehouse until the stores need it, And it pays off in customer satisfaction.

Bristol Farms uses a produce cross-dock system that takes produce off the delivery “We continue to get responses from our customer base on their experiences—we truck and puts it onto a truck to go to a Bristol Farms store. look at that on a daily basis—and there’s a lot of positive comments about the freshness In fact, produce that must be stored has a limit of 72 hours in the warehouse. and the quality and the sizing” of our produce, Gallegos says.

“Because our facility is not a large facility, it requires us to actually turn produce His office overlooks the small produce warehouse of Bristol Farms, and he tests litquicker,” says Raul Gallegos, senior director of produce and floral. “We really monitor erally every produce item that comes across the dock each day. and manage it.”

“It’s not uncommon for myself and of course our buyers and our quality control perBuying as much produce as possible from local farms and growers helps Bristol son to be down there every day. I get my fill of produce every day,” says Gallegos, who Farms get produce at its peak, ready to be sold right away. joined Bristol Farms 17 years ago as a part-time produce clerk and worked his way up “Our produce department managers write their order in the afternoon, not in the through a number of produce department posts before being named senior director morning, because we want them to know up until the last possible minute what they of produce and floral at the company. really need for the next day,” says Kevin Davis, president and CEO of “Bristol Farms is just a wonderful place to work.

Bristol Farms. “at order is electronically transmitted and consoliBristol Farms has been a great journey, and when dated to our buyer’s home where we can buy live-time on the L.A. Produce Market starting at 3 in the morning. Or they can make phone people ask when am I going to retire, I say, ‘Retire? calls to truckers who bring in fresh product from the San Joaquin Valley I’m having too much fun!’” or the Imperial Valley of California and bring the product right to our —Raul Gallegos, dock or right to the L.A. Produce Market to come to our dock, which senior director of produce and floral is only 30 minutes away. All of our produce is on our dock before 6 a.m., where we cross-dock it onto our own trucks to our stores the next day or the same day. So when we deliver fresh to the store, it really is fresh.”

Because of the way the company has set up its ordering and distribution, “we can Bristol Farms works with Kenter Canyon on its own-brand afford to go ready-to-eat or market-buy or already ripe on peaches and that kind of packaged salad and herb program, and a citrus grower in thing because we’re not holding it in a huge warehouse not knowing what the stores Beaumont provides fresh-squeezed juice every day for Bristol are going to order,” Davis adds. “We literally bring it in based on what our stores order. Farms stores.

We don’t have to buy green peaches and hope they taste good some day in the future. e company partners with Melissa’s World Variety Produce each August on a We’re buying fresh peaches and delivering them the next day.”

Hatch Chile promotion that touches not only the produce department but departIn line with Bristol Farms’ “Great Taste Just Got Better” campaign to offer even ments across the store. more natural and organic products on its shelves, the produce department has done “In the cafes they’ll have Hatch Chile omelets, Hatch Chile the same, along with an emphasis on local. burgers, Hatch Chile grilled cheese sandwiches,” according to “We’ve aligned ourselves with a number Gallegos. “It’s a great event and we get all the departments of different local suppliers, both organic involved with Hatch Chile sausage in the meat department; and conventional,” says Gallegos. kabobs with Hatch Chile, burger patties, pizzas…It just goes Kenter Canyon is an herb and baby salad on and on. We tell our customers your imagination can go supplier and Rancho Vasquez grows oras far as you want it to with Hatch chiles. ere is no end to ganic avocados, he says. ere also are a what you can do.” number of berry growers, apple growers in Davis recalls hearing Melinda Lee, the long-time, wellTehachapi and various growers in the San known Southern California radio cooking show host call Diego area. Farmers in the San Joaquin/San Bristol Farms “Disneyland for adults.”

Sebastopol area are major suppliers for “She said people can blindfold themselves, go into our Bristol Farms’ Lazy Acres store up in Santa stores and pick a produce item off the shelf and know that Barbara, which has an even stronger organic it’s going to be better than they could pick on their own produce mix. because our people are so knowledgeable and we carry “We’re building, and continue to build, reready-to-eat fresh produce,” he says. lationships with each and every one of our Davis does his own market research on produce and local suppliers to help not only from a sustainvouches for the difference it makes when produce comes able standpoint but also a relationship and to the store shortly after harvest. partnership to bring fresh and again, local, pro“I eat an apple every day, all different kinds every day; I duce for our customer base,” Gallegos says. just love apples and I always bring one with me because I know it’s healthy. Whenever “We don’t buy green tomatoes and put I have an apple that’s not one that we bought at Bristol, I can tell it’s one of those cold them in gas rooms like the chain stores do, we don’t buy green bananas and ripen storage apples that’s all dry and pithy inside and tastes like sawdust. Looks beautiful them,” says Kevin Davis, president and CEO of Bristol Farms. “We buy produce on the outside but you can tell the instant you bite into it that it’s not crisp, not flavorful. daily, we cross-dock the produce to the stores so it’s fresh on a daily basis… ey’re just not the same.”

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Central Kitchen Produces More and More of Bristol’s Own Signature Items Five days a week, 24 hours a day, Bristol Farms’ Central Kitchen is producing more than 800 items, such as meals, salads, soups and bakery products, to go out to the stores.

Why go to all the trouble of operating a 10,000-s.f. facility and paying 60 employees, most of them full-time, to make products you could buy somewhere else?

President and CEO Kevin Davis has the answer: “We could buy soup cheaper or we could buy handmade products from a third party cheaper, but they wouldn’t be as good a quality, say, as the 80 different fresh soups we make. We make items in our Central Kitchen and ship to our stores because we want them to be fresher, higher quality; we want to control the ingredients, we want to know that they’re natural and we want them to be fresh when a store gets them.”

Doug Poling, senior director of nonperishables and bakery, further explained the rationale: “We want to kind of corner the market by producing products that customers can only buy from us. ey fall in love with the products from us, and we kind of put the velvet handcuffs on them.”

According to Steve Howard, senior director of foodservice and Central Kitchen, the company’s signature soup program has been a big hit with shoppers and been very profitable for Bristol Farms.

Five soups are always available: Russian Cabbage, Clam Chowder, Matzo Ball Soup, Tomato Basil Bisque and Chicken Noodle, says Howard. “en we rotate another 10 to 15 soups a month, depending on the season. We just came out of summer, when we offered strawberry soups and gazpachos, cold soups to help beat the heat. We get into some heartier soups in the winter. We’ll go through probably about 500,000 gallons of soup a year.” e soups are packed and shipped, “usually within 24 to 36 hours, so we’re getting the freshest product available out to our stores. And we’re creating new and exciting items all the time,” he says.

About 90 percent of the ready-to-eat items in Bristol Farms delis, whether full meals, entrees or salads, are produced in the Central Kitchen as well.

Howard says everyone on the foodservice team as well as Central Kitchen staff work together to come up with ideas for items that will keep customers returning again and again.

“We’re developing new ideas and staying out in the forefront of the ever-changing, exciting food industry,” he says.

Bakery production was added to the Central Kitchen about four years ago as Bristol Farms continued to look at ways to give customers products they can only find at its stores.

So it brought one of its seasoned bakers, Trevor Strand, into the Central Kitchen, to start producing, from scratch, a number of SKUs, Poling says.

“Today we produce about 75 different (bakery) items in our Central Kitchen from scratch. Again, that number was zero in 2009. We are really, really continuing to try to grow that segment for a couple of reasons, but the primary reason is we know that anything that we bake from scratch using proprietary recipes or items that obviously consumers can only get from us, where it’s not to our advantage to bring in products from outside vendors who can obviously sell to other retailers in our marketplace. at segment continues to grow.”

Texas Chocolate Cake is the top-selling bakery item that comes out of the Central Kitchen, he adds. Also popular are its Sour

Cream Coffee Cake as well as Banana Coffee Cake created from a recipe developed by Chef Jamie Gwen, a wellknown local chef and culinary consultant for Bristol Farms.

Bristol Farms’ specialty cupcakes also continue to sell well. They were voted “Best Cupcake in Orange County” in 2007 by the Orange County Register.

Bristol Farms has committed to offering shoppers as many natural and organic products as possible throughout its stores, and that commitment extends to ingredients in its baked goods.

“It’s been a challenge, I’ll tell you, to try to find a clean, all-natural sour cream or food colorings,” Poling says. “We’ve switched over to a lot of cage-free organic eggs, but sourcing a lot of these products is a challenge. But we’re kind of chipping away at it, one SKU at a time.”

According to Davis, “We think that the real benefit to a shopper is having a relationship with the store and the people in that store that they feel they can trust. So to that point, rather than sell other people’s products throughout our store in a lot of the perishable departments, we simply call the quality ‘Bristol’s Own.’ Our positioning on our product quality, both private label and the products we make fresh from our Central Kitchen, is simply that it’s Bristol’s Own. We put our name on it…and that gives them the confidence that this isn’t somebody else’s branded product being sold in our store, that this is what Bristol is providing to us and they’re putting their full heart into the quality and their name behind that quality and that experience. I think that’s why our customers trust us and have such faith in the product quality and the experience in our stores.”

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Bristol Farms Catering Carving a Major Niche Melinda Race, Bristol Farms’ director of catering and cafe, joined Bristol Farms 15 years ago after she fell in love.

She had been a restaurant general manager for many years when she met someone who worked for Bristol Farms. What they told her intrigued her, so she went to see one of the stores.

“I fell madly in love and decided I needed to work there.”

Eventually she heard there was an opening in the catering department and applied for the job. She was hired as the catering manager.

Catering at Bristol Farms is not “handing trays of fruit or trays of meats and cheeses over counters; we actually have full-service catering. We can cater anything from a small dinner for two in your home— we’ll bring in one of our chefs— or a wedding for 250,” says Pat Posey, VP of sales and advertising, who is a frequent visitor to Bristol Farms-catered events. “We will suit a menu to anybody. Because of the vast array of foods we have in our stores, we can create a menu for just about any event.”

Under Race’s direction, Bristol Farms has gained a number of major catering clients, including the Pacific Symphony, USC Athletics Melinda Race

and UCLA. e grocer supplies food for suites as well as some for

tailgating for ESPN Radio staff at USC’s Coliseum during home games. For UCLA, Bristol Farms is the exclusive caterer this year for the 30-plus suites inside the stadium as well as for the Chancellor’s Tent, which is outside the stadium and requires food for about 1,600 people. For the second year in a row, Bristol Farms will cater for the suites and the media for both the Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Jan. 1. ousands of sports fans are fed every fall by Bristol Farms, and Race says the sports arena is the fastest growing of the catering segment.

For the symphony, Bristol Farms provides a full meal experience to those seated just beneath the orchestra in the pit area. For those more interested in a picnic-style meal, Bristol Farms’ gourmet sandwiches and complements are available to concertgoers at concessions areas.

Each of Bristol’s 14 stores has its own catering department with a catering manager, and each catering program has local offerings. “Hollywood Please see page 12BF

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Bowl” meals, for example, are offered at the Hollywood store for those who want to pick up a meal to take to the Hollywood Bowl.

Stores do catering for local businesses, taking food to the business to serve or putting together platters for events, as well as for private parties in customers’ homes, which is how Bristol Farms began catering. “at is kind of how we first started— doing in-home events,” says Race. “We’ve been known for that forever.”

Catering is a year-round business at Bristol Farms as its reputation for high quality gourmet meals and top-notch service continues to grow.

People pull it all together

that we’re out here doing this.’ “at makes me feel good, too, because I know we are bringing people into the store.”

“I’m really proud of this company,” Race continues. “I think I fell in love with it the day I walked in, and it’s still as wonderful as it was then, even better. We’re like a family. Our CEO is amazing. Our VPs are amazing. Even though we’re growing, it’s very small, if that makes sense. And I love that about it. Everybody knows you by your first name.”

To put out thousands of high quality meals in a short amount of time requires a lot of skilled hands, and Race appreciates those hands, and the people attached to those hands.

“I have the most amazing people,” she says. “ere’s something in their blood, the caterer blood—they’re never naysayers, they’re always ready to take on a challenge.

“And I think their ‘high’ is at the end of an event, to know that they pulled it off. at’s the reward—getting that event done.”

Because the number of staff needed for catering events changes from day to day and week to week, Bristol Farms has a brigade of servers who are on call to work events, but when needed, store staff For the catering staff at Bristol Farms, football season is the busiest time of year, but in a number of departments have been cross-trained to fill the gap. it’s closely followed by the holiday season.

“We’re lucky in the sense that we can pull from our stores’ talent,” Holiday meal catering at Bristol Farms is growing for a couple of different reasons: Race says.

People want a delicious holiday meal, but often they don’t have the time, skill or inclinae catering and café programs at Bristol Farms follow the stores’ em- tion to make it themselves.

According to Melinda Race, director of catering and café for Bristol Farms, the holiday phasis on “fresh good foods,” says Race, who develops the menus for both programs with input from chefs in the stores as well as chefs that work meal program “has grown every single year because a lot of people are time starved.The last thing they want to do is spend all that time in the kitchen, but they can come to our for food purveyors and Bristol’s culinary consultant, Chef Jamie Gwen. store and get food that tastes like they did spend all day in the kitchen—because we did.”

For the sports venues, Race provides suite holders with menus beCustomers can order—either in-store or online—a meal that includes turkey, gravy, fore the season begins so they can choose their meals for the home mashed potatoes and a variety of other side dishes for Thanksgiving and Christmas; a games. But, she adds, “If someone wants something special, we abHanukkah meal also is available. solutely can do it; we are a ‘yes’ catering department. If someone The meal is packed in a “big, beautiful box,” says, ‘I know the menu for this game is ribs and chicken, but we made fresh right before it’s picked up, Race really wanted tri-tip and macaroni and cheese’ or whatever, we says. The dishes are ready to be reheated at will absolutely do it. home and served to family and guests.

Race believes that the catering department is an outside marChef Jamie Gwen, culinary consultant for keting department for Bristol Farms.

Bristol Farms, also is a shopper. She vouches for the company’s holiday meal boxes.

“When we go out to do, say, UCLA football, when we’re out “The catering department at Bristol Farms there, all the employees are in a nice shirt that says ‘Bristol has been very consistent in making sure that Farms Catering’ really big on the back and on the front. en holiday meals and special occasions are guarPat’s (Posey) department does all the table signs that say anteed delicious,” she says.

‘Bristol Farms’ with the menus. We do table banners that say Shoppers also can look to Bristol Farms to ‘Bristol Farms Catering.” provide their Easter meals as well as options e servers are trained to know what’s in the dishes they’re serving. for St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween parties, “If people say to them, ‘What’s in this dish?’ as they’re serving Valentine’s Day and more. the buffet, they say, ‘is is Bristol Farms tri-tip, which is available According to Steve Howard, senior director every day in our meat department.’ We try to get them to verbally of foodservice and Central Kitchen, “We’ve market all the time because I have heard so many people in those really done a good job of trying to build busilines—they get in line to get food, and one person will tell the other ness around every holiday. We have heart-shaped meals that are somewhat like our holperson, ‘Oh my gosh, wait till you try this. You can get this every day iday/Thanksgiving meals but geared more toward a dinner for two—a heart-shaped Beef over at their meat department. You know they have a butcher and a Wellington or a salmon in a puff pastry with side dishes. And then we sell flowers and meat department.’ I hear that, and I say, ‘Wow, this makes a difference wines throughout the store around it, so it makes it that special night.”

Holidays Made Memorable with Meals Catered by Bristol Farms

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Grace-Marie’s Kitchen: e Cooking School at Bristol Farms Life’s experiences are never wasted. Before joining Bristol Farms in 1994, Grace- gram on a new path. Instead of having classes where students just sampled food, Marie Johnston spent time in a kindergarten classroom and then as an HR director “Mama Grace,” as students called her, decided to begin teaching home cooking in both local government and university settings. While doing HR for the city, her “with a Bristol flair.” love of home cooking—shown by the goodies she brought in for Every class at “Grace-Marie’s Kitchen,” whether it’s Lunch co-workers—led her supervisors to ask her to cater some meetwith Friends, Dinner at Six, Kids Kitchen, Teen Cuisine or any ings. She did, which spurred her to go back to school to earn her other, has a theme that carries through the complete menu, chef certification from the Westlake Culinary Institute. using products that can be found at Bristol Farms.

At 40, she decided a career change was in order, so she took six “I do a complete meal for every class. You don’t come and months off to discover what that was. She walked into the snack; you come and eat and you take home leftovers,” Manhattan Beach Bristol Farms store, which was “brand new and Johnston says. gorgeous,” and decided to attend a cooking class there. She went There also is an Afternoon Tea, which has become one of the to a class held at noon, designed to bring in members of the workchef ’s favorite events. It’s not “high tea” by any means, she says; ing community on their lunch break. in fact, it’s the class where there seems to be the most laughter.

Johnston attended the classes for about a month before she was In that class, she makes recipes that can be made in smaller asked to join the cooking school staff. sizes for teas or as full meals for families. It’s six courses (per“I had the teaching basics behind me, and in HR one of my big haps that’s why the smiles). emphases was training and development,” says Johnston. “So I To make students feel at home, Johnston and her staff dress took all that and just kind of incorporated it into what I naturally the tables according to the class theme or for the season. She do. It kind of flowed. I love what I do and I get to do what is my also opts for regular clothes and a baseball cap rather than Grace-Marie Johnston runs passion on a daily basis.” chef ’s whites and hat, “to hit the comfort zone for the students.

Grace-Marie’s Kitchen, At the time, Bristol Farms had two cooking schools—the other They see us as everyday average people delivering good food the cooking school at at the South Pasadena store—and Johnston worked out of both. and techniques and education so that they’re not afraid to be Bristol Farms.

Eventually, the company pared down to the one cooking school in the kitchen.” at the Manhattan Beach store. It’s located on the second floor of the store in a forMenus have changed over the years as cooking school students—which number mer vendor kitchen. between 1,000 and 2,000 per year—have changed their food habits. Today, it’s Johnston became the cooking school director and decided to take the pro- more about simplifying meal prep, she says, “because people do not want to spend Please see page 14BF

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a lot of time in the kitchen, even the ones that love to cook.”

While Johnston has found that classes geared to special nutritional needs, such as gluten-free or diabetic cooking, are not well attended, she makes sure to offer health tips as she prepares dishes in every class.

“I give them ideas on how to downsize the fat content or the sugars or how to put more healthy product in place of something else,” she says.

She even keeps notes about which students have food allergies or dislikes so that she can either alter the class’s menu or alter their personal plate when she sees their name on a class roll. It’s a tangible example of the advice she always gives to students: “Take the recipes and make them your own. Change them however you like. Use the technique and let it take you on another journey.”

The chef has created more than 4,200 recipes over the years, rarely repeating one.

Her classes draw students not only from the area around the Manhattan Beach store but as far as 50 miles away or more. Some folks make one of Bristol Farms cooking classes the focal point of a weekend trip; a “destination” cooking class of sorts.

Johnston says her cooking classes typically include about half regulars, one-quarter of people who come to classes sometimes and one-quarter new students.

“We love the new students because it infuses a little bit of freshness into what I do and it forces me to be more creative,” she says. But she also loves the regulars, who have built friendships.

Sometimes there’s crying in class as they share what’s going on in their lives.

Grace-Marie Johnston plans to continue growing the reach of her namesake cooking school, perhaps visiting Bristol Farms’ other stores and doing “market classes,” where she takes an item and does a demo in a store and offers a taste to shoppers.

“It would be delivering the same kind of attitude, education but on a downscaled fashion where it’s not a complete meal but a taste of everything that we’re making. at would be one of my goals—to get the show on the road!”

Well-Known Chef Provides Bristol Farms With Culinary Counsel People are more knowledgeable about ingredients and cuisines these days for a number of reasons, including cooking shows on television, easy access to restaurants serving international cuisines, their own travels and the worldwide web.

So how does Bristol Farms keep wowing shoppers with what it serves up?

About four years ago it enlisted a culinary consultant with an impressive resume to help guide, and elevate, the food it serves in its stores, its cafes and its catering services.

Chef Jamie Gwen is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and a certified sommelier, and she has been on radio and/or television shows in Southern California, and nationally, for the past 15 years.

“For the past four years, I’ve had the privilege of promoting and supporting this extraordinary food store,” says Gwen, a longtime fan. “I was always very impressed by how progressive Bristol Farms was. I can go in for a gorgeous bottle of wine, a scrumptious birthday cake, brown eggs or Verona cheese, and it’s always all there.”

She has helped develop recipes for items made in the company’s Central Kitchen, and has done some private catering for small groups, notes Pat Posey, VP of sales and advertising. “She goes into their homes and feeds them and talks to them throughout the evening,” he says. “She acts as not only their chef but also their sommelier.”

One of the ways the chef promotes Bristol Farms is on her weekly radio show. She highlights a new product or artisan food maker affiliated with Bristol Farms each time.

“It’s really a wonderful way to enlighten food lovers, and there are very savvy food Chef Jamie Gwen lovers out there today,” she says. “Over the years we’ve seen the advent of food on TV and the growth of the restaurant industry, and great cooks are really looking for quality. And they want to be in the know. The feedback I get is tremendous. Everyone loves to be the first one on the block with a pink pumpkin, available exclusively at Bristol Farms.”

At least four times a year, the chef does a live broadcast from a Bristol Farms store in Southern California.

“We bring in hundreds of listeners for ‘Breakfast on Bristol,’ and we talk up the best of the season and partner with companies like Melissa’s Produce—one of the partners with Bristol Farms that has, I think, really bettered the fresh approach to Bristol Farms. We’re so driven by healthy and natural today, and the produce section is so very important to eating well.

My live radio broadcasts are a thrill for me, just to be able to be in touch with and one-on-one with Bristol shoppers.”

From time to time she visits Bristol Farms stores and stations herself in the cheese department, where there is an array of more than 350 specialty cheeses. Shoppers see her in her chef ’s jacket, and perhaps recognize her from TV, and begin to ask about her favorite cheeses, which adds to her knowledge of what Bristol Farms shoppers want. e chef is involved in recipe development for Bristol Farms’ “Dinner’s Ready” program, where customers can find recipe tearpads that feature items sold at Bristol Farms, such as its handmade sausages that can be used to “make the ultimate sausage and pepper sandwich for football season,” Gwen says. “Or a fresh, wild-caught filet of salmon. e customer can simply prepare a Pernod cream sauce from just a few ingredients listed on the card, and they have this extraordinary meal. ere’s no question when you shop at a Bristol Farms that it’s going to be delicious.”

Recipes the chef has developed also are available on the Bristol Farms website and weekly customer e-mailer.

Gwen also has had input on the offerings at Bristol Farms’ seven in-store cafes.

“I’ve had influence in all of our cafés with our 500-calorie menu, where we offer a variety of new dishes that are under 500 calories but very full of flavor,” she says.

As a chef, Gwen appreciates the fact that Bristol Farms utilizes local food purveyors but balances it with the products consumers need to cook international meals as well.

“That’s the beauty of it,” she says. “Bristol Farms is really in touch with the farmers, the cheesemakers, sourcing product that is available locally, that supports our communities, and at the same time I can find the hard-to-find spices or international ingredients. There are very few stores that offer the entire package, and that’s what Bristol Farms is; it’s the whole package.”

She credits Kevin Davis, president and CEO, for helping drive Bristol Farms to excellence.

“I’ve had the privilege of spending time learning from Kevin Davis,” she says, “and I’ve never seen anyone who takes such pride in what they do.”

While Bristol Farms’ footprint is limited to California, it’s not unknown to foodies across the country. On her radio show, Gwen interviewed famous chef Emeril Lagasse, who had shopped at a Bristol Farms on a visit to California.

“During my last interview with him, he gave a shout-out to our stores. at’s pretty terrific.”

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Bristol Farms Veterans Geoff Babb, 22 Years Geoff Babb has been store director at Rolling Hills for almost three years, but his career at Bristol Farms began back in 1990 as a grocery clerk. He didn’t plan a career in food retailing, but the growth potential he saw at Bristol Farms made him rethink his plans. He worked the Woodland Hills, Newport Beach and Mission Viejo stores prior to Rolling Hills.

Another factor that played into his decision to stay at Bristol farms is the company culture.

“We’ve always had a family atmosphere at Bristol Farms, from when it was actually family Geoff Babb owned to present day. Management is very easy to work with,” he says.

“And no matter which store you go to, you always meet great people to work with.

And there’s a lot of support from the people at the office that we get at the store level.

“We were pretty much the original foodie store in Southern California, but the thing that’s always attracted me to this kind of company is that we put people first,” Babb says. “Obviously, our customers come before anything, but in terms of the employees and the relationships that you build, I have friendships going back over 20 years, good friendships, because I worked at Bristol Farms and stayed here and keep in contact with people. It’s our approach, even though it’s not really on paper or on our mission statement: People come first at Bristol Farms.

“When I got married 10 years ago, and I think about 90 percent of my wedding party was people I work with. We spend holidays together. It’s really unique and special to have that kind of opportunity to just meet different people and make lifelong friends.”

Steve Howard, 24 Years

Steve Howard

Steve Howard was a Bristol Farms holiday hire in 1988, working in the gift department at the original store in Rolling Hills. When the holidays were over, he moved over to the deli.

“I grew up in the delis,” he says, “then became an assistant store director when they started to create the store director programs.”

Store directors in conventional supermarkets typically come out of the grocery department, “but being that we’re such a perishables oriented company, our owners at the time had the foresight to start to take some folks out of the meat departments and delis to make them assistant store directors.”

He became store director at the Manhattan Beach store, was moved to Redondo Beach,

then Newport Beach.

After that, Howard spent about four years in the accounts payable department overseeing the implementation of some new systems before he was promoted to senior director of foodservice and Central Kitchen, a position he has held for seven years. e foodservice segment includes deli, specialty cheese, catering and Bristol Cafes.

His foodservice experience began at 16 in his hometown of Palos Verdes at Marineland, where he flipped burgers at Gulliver’s Galley to feed the masses who came to watch the killer whale show.

Howard has moved back to Palos Verdes where he and his wife Tracy, accounts payable manager for Bristol Farms, are raising middle-school daughters McKenna and Holly.

“Bristol Farms is not only a great place to work, but there are several couples that became married out of our jobs,” he says. e “family” atmosphere at Bristol Farms also comes from the fact that the leadership team is accessible.

“We still have a small enough company that we have access to top-down leadership, (like) Kevin (Davis, president and CEO) and Sam Masterson (EVP of operations). It’s neat that we’re still not too big, that there’s still somewhat of a family environment. e ability to be nimble and creative and have some interaction with management is great.”

Howard also is quick to credit the team at Bristol Farms for the success of all the different facets of foodservice, mentioning Melinda Race (director of catering & café), Rich Ferranda (director of deli & cheese), Michelle Salatino (foodservice merchandising assistant) and Scott Wallerstedt (deli & cheese merchandiser).

“It’s a team effort for the whole foodservice division, and I’m blessed to have them. ey have the ability to change on a dime. “e thing about foodservice is we have food that lasts a short amount of time, so

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you really have to have the training and the experience and the foresight to be thinking two hours, three hours ahead all the time. ere’s probably more moving pieces in foodservice than in any other parts of the store.

“We’re excited to celebrate 30 years of business, which in today’s world is a great accomplishment,” says Howard. “For the ‘foodies,’ the folks that love food, we’re one of the best, if not the best, specialty market in Southern California. But we’ll go toe to toe with anybody in the country.”

Ernie Mathis, 25 Years In his quarter-century at Bristol Farms, Ernie Mathis has seen the company come full circle.

He was there when the company was sold the first time, to the Kidd/Kamm investment firm, and former record executive Lou Kwiker became president.

With that change in ownership, Bristol Farms stores started carrying some more mainstream grocery products, which was a departure for the company.

“We never used to do that. It was always gourmet, natural food, and I thought that set us apart, but then we were trying to get into the big business and be a force in the industry,” Mathis recalls. e company has gone back to being privately owned again and the merchandise mix is once again going back to what Bristol Farms initially was known for—the high-quality organic, natural, “clean” food that customers can trust is good for them.

While the company still carries some traditional grocery brands for those customers who want onestop-shopping, returning to its roots seems natural.

“We’re in a different league,” Mathis says.

An opportunity too good to pass up Mathis did not set out to make a career in the grocery business but Bristol Farms changed his mind.

Ernie Mathis Now the district manager overseeing seven of the Bristol Farms stores, primarily in Los Angeles County, Mathis started out at Vons and spent about a year there before he “walked up the street and applied at Bristol Farms. I had never heard of it. I got hired on the spot—it was a lot different back then!”

He started out as a courtesy clerk, and for about the first eight years, while the football player was going to school and working mostly weekends, he always planned to do something else. “en, as we started opening stores, and I was starting to get promoted, and it evolved into a career,” he says. He went from courtesy clerk to grocery clerk to assistant grocery manager to grocery manager to assistant store director and then store director.

He became assistant district manager working at headquarters in 2006 and was promoted to district manager two years later.

Mathis oversees the sales, the labor, all the numbers, at his seven locations, traveling to each store over the course of a week.

“I meet with the store directors and walk the stores and check for standards, store conditions, customer service—just monitoring basically all of that.”

It’s exciting to Mathis that even though Bristol Farms has been around for 30 years, there are some who still don’t know about Bristol Farms, and he gets to be an ambassador for the brand when people ask him about his work.

“We’re still evolving. It’s been a slow evolution over 30 years, and we’re still evolving.

We’ve tried different avenues and tried different things, and we’re still going strong.

I’m still growing in my career, and I also know Bristol Farms is still growing.”

Doug Poling, 29 Years Doug Poling may have the most seniority of all at Bristol Farms, and maybe the most pronounced sense of humor, too. e senior director of non-perishables and bakery joined Bristol Farms about six months after the first store opened, in the spring of 1983. He was 16 years old and started out washing dishes at the café at the first store in Rolling Hills to earn spending money. A friend of his worked there, “and the rest, as they say, is history,” says Poling.

“It’s a good relationship and continues to be. ey haven’t figured out a reason to get rid of me yet, or they keep putting up with me. I’m not sure which,” he jokes.

He spent the first 10 years in foodservice at Bristol Doug Poling Farms, eventually becoming foodservice manager.

He then transitioned into store operations as a store director, and then finished his operations career four years ago as a district manager. He moved into bakery then, just as Bristol Farms had made the decision to begin baking as many of its

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Having spent nearly 30 years with the company, Poling can say with authority that the attention to detail so emphasized by Irv Gronsky and Mike Burbank is still alive and well, as is the family atmosphere, even though the company has grown. e original owners had “almost maniacal attention to detail. But it also was a genuine culture that was created, again primarily by those two gentlemen, where they would always come to every person working at a particular shift or department and shake your hand and ask, ‘How is everything? How is your family?’ ey had an intimate knowledge of a person far beyond just the contribution the individual made to the company. It was truly—I’m sure you hear it all the time—but it was truly a family culture, and I think Kevin (Davis) and Sam (Masterson) and our current leadership group have done a tremendous job in being able to take that culture and nurture it through the years. I’d be lying to you if I told you it was exactly the same today as it was back then, but you know what? It’s pretty darn close. A lot of it is that Kevin, in his infinite wisdom, kept around old dinosaurs like me and we probably keep preaching the way things used to be 20, 30 years ago, and the formula kind of works.

“Mike and Irv used to say, ‘It’s a real simple proposition; we’re going to simply source the finest products available. We’re going to put it in a very pleasant environment where we want the customer to think that this is a journey or an experience and not a chore to come to Bristol Farms. We’re going to offer a tremendous service, and at the end of the day, the price is going to be what the price is going to be. Meaning, we’re going to provide all that, and if there’s folk out there that didn’t mind paying prices that were a little bit higher, then we’re going to build the business on that.’ “irty years later, I think they were pretty insightful on that. I think a lot of people equate value simply to ‘What’s the cheapest from a price point?’ But there’s a lot more that goes into value. When you buy produce from Bristol Farms, it might be more expensive, but you’re going to get 100 percent usage out of that product, and you’re going to be able to eat it all; you’re going to be able to enjoy it all. And at the end of the day, the yield component of value, I would take the position of, as good or greater at Bristol Farms than many of our competitors.”

Mark Taylor, 26 Years Mark Taylor, employee services manager, once turned down a job at Bristol Farms.

He was working for a chain store when he decided to apply for the meat manager job at Bristol Farms’ South Pasadena store. He was offered the job at Bristol Farms,

Anniversary but his current employer offered him a promotion, so he stayed put. After about six months, he realized he might have made the wrong choice.

“And I just happened to get another call from Bristol Farms. So I went to be a meat manager at the Rolling Hills location. at was in ’86.”

He’s stayed put at Bristol Farms since then, although his experiences have been anything but static. After about 10 years he moved from meat management into store operations as a store director, spent 10 years doing that and then moved into the human resources arena. He’d always had a special interest in HR, but he wanted to make sure that was the direction he really wanted to go so he enrolled in a continuing education class. It confirmed his choice.

Managing the company’s health benefits proMark Taylor gram is a major part of his job description, but other employee-related services fall under his umbrella as well, such as wellness events and internal job postings.

A yearly wellness event at Bristol Farms is a triathlon, which consists of a half-mile swim, an 11-mile bike ride and a three-mile run. It is held in Long Beach.

Bristol Farms used this year’s event, on Sept. 16, to advertise its Lazy Acres store that opens Nov. 7 in Long Beach.

“We had shirts made that said, ‘Lazy Acres is Coming to Long Beach.’ It gave us an opportunity to promote the company while doing the event,” says Taylor, who not only plans the event but participates as well in one or all events. President and CEO Kevin Davis, an avid bicyclist, participates in the triathlon each year himself.

Taylor says Bristol Farms has made a concerted effort in recent years to communicate clearly with employees when a position opens up.

“We’ve been very good about publicly posting jobs and interviewing people throughout the company, giving the opportunity for them to come in and apply for positions,” Taylor says.

Bristol Farms has about 1,400 employees, so Taylor and his four staff members stay busy.

While paperwork and computer work are major parts of his job, Taylor appreciates Please see page 18BF the fact that the “human” aspect of HR at

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at sets us apart, as well as the quality of floral products we carry in our stores.”

Getting quality floral items into the store is a matter of strong relationships buyers have built with suppliers over the years, he adds.

With Bristol Farms’ floral, bakery and catering capabilities, a wedding or other special event is in the bag, beautifully and deliciously.

Bristol Farms’ ‘Shining Stars’ Debi Kordones Debi Kordones, floral manager at Bristol Farms’ Westchester store, was a winner in this year’s Fresh Produce & Floral Council competition. e Southern Californiabased organization holds a convention each year, and Kordones came out on top in a sort of mystery basket competition for floral designers.

“You are given a bag or box of different types of flowers and supplies and you have t to create an arrangeDebi Kordones, Floris ment,” according to Raul Gallegos, senior director of produce and floral at Bristol Farms, who is a strong believer in the FPFC as a networking organization for local retailers and suppliers.

He has served as chairman of the organization as well.

Every Bristol Farms store offers floral services, performed by floral experts.

“We have floral managers at each location with the ability to create custom floral arrangements, and that’s the uniqueness about our floral department,” Gallegos says. “We have 12 designers on staff that can create a beautiful arrangement out of an array of different flowers or items you’d like included; they’re very talented.

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Bristol Farms is never forgotten. “e major reason I came over to Bristol Farms so many years ago is because I had been in the supermarket world, and I didn’t care for that environment and lack of care for customers and their employees,” he says.

One of the ways the company indicates that it cares about employees is a feedback program called “The Voice.”

Last year, the company sent out a survey to all its employees covering several different categories but all with the general theme of “How do you feel about Bristol Farms?”

One thing the survey revealed was that employees missed the company picnics Bristol Farms once had.

Trevor Strand Trevor Strand is a second-generation baker at Bristol Farms.

His mom, Kay Strand, was a bakery manager for the company for a number of years. Although she passed away a few years ago, “her legacy lives on through him,” says Doug Poling, senior director of non-perishables and bakery for Bristol Farms. “He’s just a great testament to what’s made our company as special as it has been throughout the years.” e younger Strand started working at Bristol Farms’ South Pasadena store when he was a “youngster,” according to Poling, and now he has been with the company for more than 20 years. He was recruited to the company’s Central Kitchen at company headquarters in Carson about four years ago when Bristol Farms decided to begin producing, from scratch, a number of its bakery offerings.

Although he has no formal bakery training, he has attended “Bristol U,” Poling jokes.

Trevor Strand with But most importantly, he has a true gift for his famous Texas Chocolate Cake.

So Bristol Farms’ 2012 company picnic was held the first weekend of September over two days to give as many employees as possible the opportunity to attend.

“We got all good feedback on that, and as we go forward I think it’s going to be more and more popular,” Taylor says.

As with the triathlon, many executives attended the picnic.

“They’re accessible,” notes Taylor. “I think that’s really important.” rough “e Voice,” employees also expressed their opinion that they would like the company uniform, which has been red gingham checks virtually from the beginning, to be updated.

So, “right now we’re in the process of changing our

96 • Bristol Farms 30th Anniversary – A Shelby Report Special Section

uniforms,” he says, adding that they will be collared shirts to reflect the upscale nature of Bristol Farms. e uniform update will start with the Long Beach Lazy Acres store, which converted from Bristol Farms to the natural/organic format.

“It’s a little less formal, more (like a) T-shirt, for all the departments,” although the sushi chefs in each store will continue to wear their chefs coats, says Taylor.

Creating a Better Bristol Employee input also forms the basis for “Creating a Better Bristol.”

Staff members are asked to submit their ideas for improvements in the company, and the marketing directors look at each one. en they contact each employee who submitted an idea to tell them if it will be implemented or not and perhaps discuss how the idea might be tweaked to be more viable.

Taylor says it’s a way of “making sure everybody knew that we were listening. Sometimes you just go along and you do business and it’s easy to take things for granted until you ask, ‘What’s important to you?’ I keep coming back to it: ‘Listen to the voice of the people in the stores.’”

Executive accessibility adds to the free flow of ideas at Bristol Farms.

“People like Kevin (Davis), Sam (Masterson), Adam (Caldecott), Pat (Posey)—they all are very accessible. It’s not intimidating for me to go over and talk to one of them. I really appreciate it and I think it keeps that, if you will, ‘family’ atmosphere. ey’re not too busy to have a conversation, and it’s not always about work,” Taylor says.

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“He has created just a litany of special recipes, many of which are cornerstones of our bakeries, like Texas Chocolate Cake.”

Poling says Texas Chocolate Cake, made in California, is the top signature item in Bristol Farms’ bakeries. “It’s a sinfully rich chocolate cake with icing that’s filled with pecans, and the icingto-cake ratio is literally about two-thirds cake, one-third icing.

Many people have trouble taking more than a couple of bites. I, on the other hand, could eat a whole piece, no problem. It’s really a chocolate lovers dream.”

Strand also came up with a newer offering from the bakery, cake pops, that he developed in tandem with Robin Bell, bakery/coffee director.

“It’s (Bell’s) brains and creativity along with Trevor’s creativity and experience as a baker that really bring all these items to life,” says Poling. “Trevor, he’s a gem.”

Chuck Eallonardo Bristol Farms’ CFO, Chuck Eallonardo, was a finalist in the CFO of the Year competition sponsored by the Los Angeles Business Journal this year.

Sam Masterson, EVP of operations for Bristol Farms, says, “We were proud to support Chuck at the recent CFO of the Year Awards ceremonies.”

Eallonardo has been with Bristol Farms for about 10 years and as CFO has been Chuck Eallonardo instrumental in facilitating the ownership changes that have taken place during that time.

“Chuck helped us navigate through the integration with Albertsons and then Supervalu and then the ultimate separation of Bristol Farms into a stand-alone business,” Masterson notes.

“We are very proud of Chuck and his accomplishments.”

Davis Honored by USC Marshall in 2011 The Food Industry Management (FIM) Program at the University of Southern California (USC) is unique in its dedication to providing a concentrated management development program for high-potential managers of proven ability from food industry companies.

Bristol Farms’ Kevin Davis, who graduated from the program while working for Ralphs as a college student, was named the USC Marshall Executive of the Year in 2011. As such, he spoke at the awards banquet during which the 2011 FIM class was honored.

Davis spoke of how the USC program teaches people to work together as a team and ultimately teaches each person how to be a leader in his or her own right. He gave examples of how when a company succeeds, the credit should go to the people instead of the “company.”

He urged the graduating students to stay in touch with their USC professors, other students in the program and all the valuable contacts they have made throughout the 14-week program. Davis said that was a key element in his successful career.

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Davis was named Executive of the Year in 2011 by the FIM program.

In fact, most of Bristol Farms’ senior management team are FIM graduates, including Sam Masterson (EVP of operations), Pat Posey (VP of sales and advertising) and Adam Caldecott (SVP of marketing and merchandising).

The program is very intense, according to those who go through it. It covers “all aspects of leadership and management,” Masterson says. “It’s a great blend of both domestic and “ere’s a strong emphasis on education at Bristol Farms,” says Yolie Pepin, seninternational students from retailers as well ior director of human resources. as suppliers.”

It doesn’t matter what level of the company the staff member is on, either.

Masterson, who went through the program From hourly employees up through management, “We’re giving them the when he was with Ralphs earlier in his career, tools to do that, and we’re providing the time as well—because scheduling can says his biggest takeaway from the program has be an issue,” she says. “But we’re committed to that; we’re committed to clearing Sam Masterson to do with people skills. their schedule.”

“Our business, you’ve heard it a million times, we consider it to be a people busiSome of the tools Bristol Farms is providing educationally include scholarships for employees and children of employees as well as stipends and access to tuition ness, and I like to think that if there is one skill I have it’s being a good listener. I reimbursement from the Western Association of Food Chains (WAFC) and the took that away from the program, and it’s helped me not only with my business career but also personally as well,” he says.

California Grocers Association (CGA). e FIM program is for those who have earned at least an associate’s degree and are being Education is part of the culture groomed for the management ranks. e emphasis on education comes from the top at Bristol Farms.

For those who for some reason are not able to Kevin Davis, president and CEO, went through the Food Industry Management devote themselves to the 14-week FIM program, (FIM) program at USC while he was still a college student. He was a senior prelaw major at UCLA working at Ralphs at the time, and Ralphs asked him if he there is a shorter Food Industry Executive Program, a weeklong course at USC’s Marshall wanted to attend the year-long grocery industry program at USC. “I told them, well, why would I do that? I’m a senior at UCLA and I’ve worked School of Business. CFO Chuck Eallonardo, for my way through college to this point; why would I do that this year? If I did it, example, is a graduate of that course.

The Retail Management Certificate proit would be later on. They said, ‘well, if you’ll do that we’ll consider paying for gram is for food industry employees of all levyour continuing education as well, if you want to go.’” els who want to enhance their potential It was an offer too good to pass up, so Davis transferred to USC’s business school and/or figure out if they want to make the and completed the FIM program in 1978. “en, ironically, I didn’t go to law school. ey just kept promoting me after food industry their career.

Frank Mota, HR generalist at Bristol Farms, that, and I actually went back to UCLA to Anderson School of Business to the exjoined the company about six years ago after Frank Mota ecutive MBA program, which (Ralphs) did pay for and where I was elected presiworking in HR at dent of my class.”

Smart & Final for about eight years.

Among his responsibilities is communicating with employees about educational opportunities that are available, including the $3,000 employee scholarship and $2,000 scholarship for children of employees as well as the Retail Management Certificate program.

“I go out to the stores, give the presentations on the classes, let them know what’s available out there to at Bristol Farms’ Long Beach Donna Hunter, coffee manager ate. tific Cer nt me age Man them, help them get started in any ail Ret store, recently earned her ically typ t tha s ege coll nity mu com at way I can, let them know that with That is a program offered e. It consists of 10 courses covplet com to s our partnership with the California nth mo 24 to 18 es tak iness math, accounting, bookbus as h suc ics bas Grocers Association (CGA), they can s ines bus g erin nagement, marketing, human ma s, tion nica mu com l ora get reimbursed for these classes,” g, pin kee ement and computers. nag ma ces our res an hum s, tion Mota says. rela all the courses online so that Some of these colleges are offering When Mota receives information e. tim e sam ool and work at the certificate seekers can go to sch from junior colleges about class availfrom rium ora receive a $200 hon Those who earn the certificate ms Far tol ability, registration dates, etc., he Bris ch Chains (WAFC), whi the Western Association of Food s cer Gro nia ifor Cal passes the information along. team members. The matches as an incentive for its istance, so “our ass ent sem “We also give them the names of the bur reim ion tuit s Association (CGA) also provide ost for alm s ter rse Hun cou na 10 e Don tak people directly in charge of the Retail , ege coll employees can go to community ces for our res an hum of r cto dire Management Certificate program as ior nothing,” says Yolie Pepin, sen well,” adds Mota, who took advantage Bristol Farms. r of two, “She is going to have a , says of Hunter, a wife and mothe ons rati ope of CGA’s tuition reimbursement proof EVP s.” on, litie ters sibi Mas respon Sam ly being considered for additional tain cer is ts, she ; den her stu of h gram when he was pursuing his dead wit ahe ties eer uni great car al opport Farms who promotes education tol Bris for list era gen .

HR tion gree in business while working for ta, mo Mo pro Frank tone to tificate really can be a steppings Cer nt me the age at Man m ail tea Ret ent the em t Smart & Final. notes tha our manag these courses have gone on into “Some people who have taken “I saw what education did for me store level.” and how that catapulted my career, my experience. And that’s why I’m such a huge advocate of it,” he says.

Bristol Farms Promotes, Supports Education

Hunter Among ose Who Have Earned Retail Management Certificate

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Keeping the E-Dialogue Going Keeps Vuletich Going Facilitating digital communication is the overarching mission of Nicole Vuletich, Bristol Farms’ webmaster. e company website, obviously, is this webmaster’s domain, but Vuletich also handles e-communication with shoppers and Bristol Farms’ team members, pulling the vendor community into the loop whenever possible.

Here’s a look at what Bristol Farms is doing in the digital arena:

•Mobile Website In September 2012, Bristol Farms launched a mobile version of its website, prompted by analytics showing a large increase, about 136 percent, in the company’s mobile audience. e regular website was “cumbersome” to put on a mobile screen, “so we felt the need to make a mobile experience for our customers,” Vuletich says.

On the home page of the mobile site, weekly specials are at the top, followed by seasonal items, events or products the company wants to highlight, she says. In the fall, for instance, the holiday meals from the catering department might be featured.

Underneath that, there is a live blog feed, she says, “which is unique to the mobile site compared to the full-version site.”

Bristol Farms’ buyers and merchandisers are the bloggers since they are the experts on their products. “Sometimes it’s on specific products that are limited edition in the stores— things that customers may want to jump on almost immediately, so we felt it was important to put a live blog feed there so they can see what’s current and exciting at Bristol Farms, what’s going on. It’s something a little unique that we bring to our company.”

It can be event information, product information, lifestyle information—“just us being passionate about food, about our vendor partners, our communities,” says Vuletich.

•Social Media: “It’s all about interactivity; on Facebook, for instance, the more the customers ‘like’ your posts or comment on your posts, we get greater visibility,” Vuletich points out. “We try to do posts our customers will engage in. We will ask them a question or post something that will, hopefully, appeal to them.”

During this year’s Hatch Chile promotion at Bristol Farms, a popular event each August during the pepper’s very short growing season, Vuletich says she “pumped out information multiple times a day on Hatch Chiles on Facebook (and on Twitter), and we got more engagement from our customers than I’ve ever seen. Our numbers just went through the roof with that special promotion.”

She envisions more of these promotions, using “products we can create excitement over, with recipes and getting each department involved and making it a truly exciting event not only for our stores and our employees but for our customers. Because we really do see a difference in the engagement when you have these types of promotions.”

She also says customers sometimes tag Bristol Farms on their Facebook posts with a picture of something they’re about to eat that they either got or made from ingredients

from Bristol Farms. “When they tag us, they’re inviting us into their world, using our product. We respond to 100 percent of those.”

In addition to communicating through Facebook and Twitter, Bristol Farms has an Instagram account and recently opened a Pinterest account with about 10 “boards.” e Hatch Chile promotion merited its own board; now the focus has shifted to a “Fall Is Here” board.

“We’re pinning photos that inspire us that are out Nicole Vuletich there in the Pinterest world, as well as products of our own that are fall-related,” she says.

Vuletich also pins “great photos from our ads, some of our great products that are unique to Bristol Farms.”

Social media is simply about communication, Vuletich adds. “I use social media as a way to notify customers of things that are going on. About 90 percent of the time we’re linking somewhere in our social media post back to our website. We ultimately want to always bring our customer back to our website for more information.”

• The ‘E-Mailer’ is weekly email goes out to shoppers who either sign up on the Bristol Farms website or in the store.

Like with the mobile website, the “e-mailer” always includes whatever is on sale that week, such as hot soups in the deli or live Maine lobster, along with a link back to the website for more information on the weekly specials.

In October, for instance, the e-mailer featured Halloween-related items that are unique to Bristol Farms.

“In our bakery we have pumpkin whoopie pies, candied apples, cookies and brownies that are all decorated cute for Halloween,” she says. “Our floral department makes some really unique, beautiful floral arrangements that are fall related; instead of using a vase they’ll use a pumpkin as the vessel. In our deli department we have some great fall products like pumpkin soup and pumpkin cream cheese—those are unique to Bristol Farms.”

Event information also is communicated through the e-mailer. e Rolling Hills store, for instance, held a Halloween pet adoption with the help of Cru Vin Dogs wine and the SPCA of Los Angeles. A portion of the wines’ sales was donated to SPCA-LA. Customers also were invited to dress their pets in Halloween costumes and bring them down to the store parking lot for a costume contest.

“We try to reach out to the community around each store in that fashion,” Vuletich says.

Another well-received portion of the e-mailer is a free product coupon. e freebie is typically related to a weekly sale item. “is week we have Ambrosia apples on sale and we’re giving away a caramel apple dip

by Litehouse,” she says. “So it usually pairs with whatever is on the ad.

We get pretty good redemption on those, and it’s climbing each week.”

Bristol Farms’ culinary consultant, Chef Jamie Gwen, often provides recipes for the e-mailer to entice customers to the store and into their kitchens.

• The Employee E-Newsletter e employee e-newsletter, titled “e Bristol Beat,” features communication from the corporate office as well as store news. e corporate office communication usually comes from Kevin Davis, president and CEO, or Sam Masterson, EVP of operations.

It also features “things that are going on in the stores, what’s going on with employees in the stores,” according to Vuletich. “at gets great readership. It’s fun stories about employees, like a ‘get to know’ section, special achievements or awards they’ve received, retirements, promotions, special events.”

Special events for employees have become a special focus of Bristol Farms. e events, about one a month, are spearheaded by a committee of staff members. A picnic and a hike are among the events that have taken place thus far. “ese are kind of like meet-and-greets—opportunities for employees in all our locations to meet each other. ey can talk about their successes, their challenges. It’s fun,” she says.

What’s on tap for the digital year 2013 at Bristol Farms?

Vuletich says one of the goals is to overhaul the online shopping feature at bristolfarms.com to make it easier for customers to use to order groceries to be delivered to their homes.

A mobile app for Bristol Farms also is in the exploratory stages, she says, adding, “We want to bring some sort of a unique offering or user experience for customers through that.”

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Hand-Made Sushi Program Sets Bristol Farms Apart As more and more Americans learn to love sushi, today’s supermarkets are driven to find a supplier so they can offer some selections to those shoppers seeking sushi.

Not so at Bristol Farms; they make their own sushi fresh in every store.

One of the company’s original owners, Irv Gronsky, was a frequent sushi restaurant visitor back in the 1980s and knew he wanted to offer sushi to Bristol Farms shoppers. us began his campaign to recruit Yoshi Kubo from the restaurant where he was working. e restaurant was owned by an uncle of Kubo, who came to the United States in 1969 from Japan. At first Kubo hesitated, but eventually he realized it was a rare opportunity since sushi was at that time only available in a few restaurants and a few Asian markets in Southern California.

As Kubo recalls it: “e owner of Bristol Farms, he was my sushi customer. He asked me (if I wanted to come to work for him) and at first I said no because I was a chef, I didn’t work in a market! But then I decided I want to do something different. Nobody had sushi in (a supermarket) at that time, 1986/1987, and that was very interesting. So I say, OK, I’ll try it and see what happens.

Master Sushi Chef Yoshi Kubo

South Pasadena store.

Developing a sushi program in a supermarket environment was plowing new ground, and it wasn’t easy, he says. “I can’t copy nobody, everything new.” at was in addition to the language barrier the Japanese speaker faced in trying to train Bristol Farms’ American staff members to make sushi.

But the fresh sushi program took root, and in the early ’90s, Craig Tsuchiyama joined Bristol Farms. Born in America to Japanese parents, Tsuchiyama helped Kubo with communication as well as with making more American-style sushi.

Tsuchiyama, who is the seafood and sushi buyer/merchandiser for Bristol Farms, continues to work alongside Kubo. Kubo says he couldn’t do it without his assistance. rough the years, the spicy tuna roll has continued to be the best seller for the sushi department at Bristol Farms, but there’s something for every sushi lover.

“Some people want the original sushi, some people want the new style sushi, so we have to have everything,” Kubo says.

Customers can count on Bristol Farms to sell only the freshest sushi, he adds. About 80 percent of what is left in the case at the end of the day is thrown out; only a select few items are able to be sold the next day.

“We always sell sushi,” Kubo says. “In other stores they open a little bit, they shut down (their sushi operations). We have these 25 years, every day, (sold) sushi, so I guess people like it.”

Kubo, who says he never studied the English language but “just tried to make the sushi every day,” is clear about one thing: “I love Bristol Farms. at’s why I’ve been here for many years.”

“And now it’s been 25 years.” e way Kevin Davis sees it, having freshly made sushi in every store is just part of being a trusted fresh food source for customers.

Whether it’s the deli, the bakery, the in-store café or the sushi case, Bristol Farms is going to freshly prepare as many of the items as it can, whether in its central kitchen or at the stores.

“Department by department, that’s the case,” says Davis. “If we run a sushi department, we don’t have third-party sushi guys coming and going to other supermarkets. It’s all of our own people trained by our third-generation master sushi chef Yoshi Kubo from Japan. All the sushi sold in our stores is hand-made by our people.”

Kubo started working for Bristol Farms in its second store, the

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Newport Beach Remodel Is Bristol Farms Prototype Described by Bristol Farms as one of its “most celebrated” stores, the Newport Beach location reopened Aug. 15, 2012, following a long-anticipated remodel that gave the store a new look inside and out.

Customers flocked to the grand opening, Bristol Farms says, curious to see the changes at the store on Avocado Boulevard at the corner of MacArthur and Pacific Coast Highway that opened its doors in 1998.

“We have been planning the remodel of this store for some time and are very pleased to offer a new and exciting store to our most loyal customers,” said Kevin Davis, president and CEO of Bristol Farms, at the time of the opening.

“Our best tasting, freshest food offering is what this neighborhood is looking for and our vast product mix is unique to the area and will fulfill a need that Newport Beach is hungry for.

“The improved Newport Beach store features a well thought out designed décor package that celebrates and highlights the Newport Beach community in an old fashioned mercantile manner that is unique to any grocery store,” Davis added.

The store’s layout was changed around to make shopping simpler for customers, says Adam Caldecott, SVP of marketing and merchandising for Bristol Farms.

The wine department, with a store-within-a-store feel, is at the end of the shopping pattern so that customers can match what’s in their carts with just the right wine.

“Our wine department is spectacular,” notes Sam Masterson, EVP of operations. “We consider that to be one of a kind; it really is a showpiece.”

Adds Caldecott, “In the foodservice department, we opened up the aisleway to allow for more food bars and food stations, so it’s more like a food court. Customers look at us as a source for good food, so it makes us a wonderful lunch stop for the customer as well as their place of shopping as well.”

Caldecott was a liaison between the store design and merchandising teams on the Newport Beach remodel. He takes the ideas, like the Artisan Style Wood Stone Pizza Oven and Hot Wok Asian Fusion Station, and figures out how to make them work in the store.

“More than anything, I try to be their cheerleader, to step outside the box and not be fearful, but be fearless to try new things. My involvement in the design is really just to coach and help them be creative,” he says. “We work like a family, so everybody has insights into how the store ultimately comes out. I’m really just a culmination of my merchandising team at the end of the day.”

The look of the future Masterson says Bristol Farms considers the Newport Beach design to be “prototypical of our future Bristol Farms stores.

“We’ve added pretty much every bell and whistle we’ve ever done. The size of the store we consider it to be optimal for what we do, and the configuration of the departments to give us what we need to optimize the customer experience. We took the original store and some of the elements we had and we added a sandwich carving station; we added a wok grill; and we added a hot pizza station. Plus we added a salad bar.

“And, basically, we replaced the entire sales floor for the customer. In an effort to gain more space, we were forced

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25BF to take advantage of every dead zone in the store, to turn it into an effective merchandising spot,” he continues. “We have more efficient category layouts, more efficient category adjacencies and a better overall traffic flow. Things are where you would expect to find them as a shopper.”

Newport Beach is a hotly contested market in the food arena, he says.

“That neighborhood is very unique, and the competition is such that you need to be in that level of business to compete in that area. The wine department is second to none—the same with all the departments in that store. Pretty much the best, most expansive offerings we’ve ever had. We really took a store that was a bit difficult to shop and we simplified it a great deal for the customers. The new, improved layout is much more customer friendly.”

It’s also a “green” store, now outfitted with state-of-the-art energy-efficient LED lighting and sustainable finishes wherever practical.

“The goal for us has always been creating a Disneyland-type experience around food within our stores,” according to Caldecott. “Newport Beach achieves that.”

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What makes Bristol Farms Newport Beach special?

• New Farm Fresh Salad Bar • Newly expanded ‘Fresh from our Kitchens’ Soup Bar • New Artisan Style Wood Stone Pizza Oven • New Hot Wok Asian Fusion Station • New made-to-order Sandwich Station featuring Fresh Cooked Tri Tip, Pulled Pork and Hot Turkey

• Newly remodeled: Our largest and most extensive wine and micro-beer selection in our company

• Newly expanded Coffee Bar • New Bulk Food offering • More than 350 different types of artisan cheeses from around the world • Huge selection of produce from around the world including locally grown natural and organic items • Fresh hand-selected seafood delivered fresh daily • Organic and free-range poultry, antibiotic/hormone-free and air-chilled chicken • Hormone- and antibiotic-free American raised all natural beef including prime and aged beef • In-store Café and coffee bar for shoppers that would like to dine instore • Ready-to-eat and prepared foods that are healthy, delicious and restaurant quality • Olive bar featuring varieties from around the world • European artisan hearth-style breads baked fresh daily • Full selection of dairy products, both organic and conventional • A full-service floral shop featuring quality flowers, plants from all over the world with floral designers on site • Fresh sushi prepared daily by master sushi chefs

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Bristol Cafes Serve as a Gateway to the Aisles Bristol Farms’ seven in-store cafes serve breakfast and lunch. e full-service cafes seat about 60 people, and from the beginning, their purpose has been to bring people into the store not only for a hot meal but to introduce them to the rest of the store.

Steve Howard, senior director of foodservice and Central Kitchen, says that “having a café in the store has always been an entryway to the store. e prepared foods, sandwiches, salads and some of the entrees in the café—they’re eating the same food we serve throughout the store. What a novel idea the original owners had that once you got them in there, they were already in your establishment, so they’re apt to go push a cart around and buy some food.”

The café’s breakfast menu offers a range of choices, from bagels and oatmeal to pancakes, waffles, French toast and eggs in various ways.

Lunchtime features soups, salads, gourmet burgers, sand-

wiches and wraps.

A big draw in the cafes is the $4.99 breakfast special. Melinda Race, director of catering and café, says more than 2,000 people come in to enjoy “Bristol’s Own Traditional Breakfast” in any given week. It features two eggs scrambled, two strips of bacon, morning potatoes, two slices of wheat toast and a cup of coffee.

While there is some profit margin in the meal, it really serves that larger purpose: “It gets people into the stores and hopefully they’re doing their shopping.”

Because the cafés are closed in the evenings, it opens up the opportunity for groups to come in and use the space for meetings or small parties, Race notes. “If anybody wants to come in and do any kind of meetings or small events or small parties, we love that.” e café or the catering department will be happy to provide the food, she adds.

Thursdays find the cafes being used for wine tastings, which have become very popular for

Bristol Farms. The grocer keeps about 2,000 wines in its own warehouse, a mix of mainstream and more exclusive labels. The tastings are put on hold during the busy holiday season but pick back up in time for Valentine’s Day. e café menu changes every two years, Race says, but specials keep things fresh.

Different Ways to Grow in the Future…

With 30 years of success as a foundation and owners fully devoted to its success, Bristol Farms has every reason to look to the future with expectancy.

Its holding company, Good Food Holdings, recently invested in Seattle’s Metropolitan Markets, a group of six stores that go to market much like Bristol Farms, and in early November, Bristol Farms unveiled the second Lazy Acres store in Long Beach, turning one of its own-banner stores into the highly successful natural/organic format.

Adding the Metropolitan Markets stores in Seattle to Good Food Holdings, alongside Bristol Farms, offers many benefits to both store groups, says Kevin Davis, Bristol Farms president and CEO. For Terry Halverson, owner of Metropolitan Markets, the deal allows for faster market area growth, Davis notes.

“But primarily, the reason we were interested in the deal is because the stores are great stores. ey have high-end offerings with all the service departments, great food and a really high service environment, much like Bristol Farms. So we are very compatible.”

Both count Unified Grocers as their primary supplier, and “they’re procuring produce from California, and we’re shipping salmon down from Seattle, so there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of opportunity for us to benefit both businesses through synergies while still keeping both businesses autonomous in terms of the go-to-mar-

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ket strategy for the consumer,” Davis continues.

“Terry and I want both formats to be independent and go to market separately; they know their market better than we do, and we know Southern California. It’s simple on the backstage opportunities; wherever opportunity exists, we will take them. We will be able to use our leverage and size with our suppliers to do a better job and lower our costs and hopefully be more efficient.”

Davis believes having three formats under the same ownership umbrella—Bristol Farms, Lazy Acres and Metropolitan Markets—opens up opportunities.

“We think we could grow to have an entire portfolio of regional high-end specialty retailers that have a very good reputation in their own marketplaces and would benefit from not spending redundantly on unnecessary backstage development,” he explains. “As you get bigger, everyone wants to build their own warehouse, have their own central kitchen or invest in other backstage service departments, but if you have that service provided by the holding company, then you don’t have to duplicate those expenses and we can all really concentrate on our customers and our stores and the service we provide and grow that part of the business rather than all of us duplicating backstage costs.

“We have three formats to grow and put our assets where we get the best return,” he says, adding, “We both have some new stores coming that we haven’t announced.”

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MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE SHELBY REPORT OF THE WEST!

DECEMBER 2012