Currently, Flack says, U.S. Hispanics don’t buy much frozen food. Consumer Brands hopes to change that via a joint venture with Mexico-based frozen-food company La Huerta. Schwan’s will be testing a full line of Mexican frozen vegetables through Wal-Mart, HEB, and Fiesta Foods stores in Texas. If the test goes well, Schwan’s will introduce the line later this year in Chicago, then to other areas with large Hispanic populations. The move would catapult the company into a new category—frozen vegetables—as well as a new consumer base.
Schwan’s work with focus groups also showed that some consumers who want to cook often don’t, because they didn’t either have time or know how. Last year, the company brought out its Freschetta Build & Bake line. Build & Bake is sold as “separates”—packages for crust type, sauces, cheese, and toppings. Consumers purchase the separates they like and then make their own pie. “It’s about the experience of making food together,” Jansen says, as well as the ability to customize a pizza. The product line is Consumer Brands’ first foray into the refrigerated section (as opposed to the freezer case) of the supermarket.
The nature of frozen foods inherently makes them a convenience food, but Alderink says convenience could soon mean more than just being able to pull something out of the freezer and pop it into the microwave. It might mean bigger print, so baby boomers don’t have to grab their reading glasses when they want to read a package label. “In the future, portability might mean that a product is easy to take to the TV or computer as opposed to taking it in the car with you,” she adds.
Portability is key to Schwan’s in other ways as well. The Consumer Brands division has delivery trucks bearing the Red Baron and Freschetta names. Not one says Schwan’s; not one is yellow. These trucks pick up products from 150 distribution facilities that stretch coast to coast and deliver them to grocery stores, supercenters, warehouse clubs, and food stores specializing in natural and organic products. While offering direct-to-the-store delivery may cost a little more, Flack says it allows Schwan’s to work more closely with retailers to ensure they have the right product mix and that the products are well positioned on the shelf.
The delivery strategy also allows Schwan’s to roll out a product nationally in about two weeks’ time, compared to two months (or more) using the more common warehouse distribution method, where products are shipped to a grocer’s warehouse and then distributed to individual stores. The trucks are thus a key component of the growth strategy of the division that could soon become Schwan’s largest.
However far the Schwan Food Company has driven from its humble origins, it’s still about the trucks.
That's Amore How Wolfgang Puck and Schwan Foods got
together. “One day, Johnny Carson came into Spago [Puck’s Beverly Hills flagship restaurant] and ordered 10 pizzas,” Puck recalls. “I said, ‘What are you going to do with ten pizzas?’ He said, ‘I just freeze them and I take one out when I want one.’ I said, ‘What are you doing to my pizzas?’” Once Carson convinced the incredulous Puck that the pizzas actually tasted fine after being frozen, Puck tried it himself at home. It passed his taste test, and he soon began freezing pizzas to sell. Because the capital costs to mass produce frozen pizzas were so high, Puck licensed his brand to Omaha-based ConAgra Foods in the 1990s. “They thought they knew [pizza] better than me,” he says. ConAgra’s version of a Puck pizza began to look very different than an upscale Puck creation, so the world-renowned chef purchased the license back from ConAgra in May 2006. He turned to Schwan Foods Consumer Brands, which launched Wolfgang Puck All Natural pizza in November of last year. So far, Puck says his marriage with Schwan’s has been agreeable. Both want to expand the Wolfgang Puck brand into other categories, which could include entrées, sauces, and salad dressings. Puck says that one of the things he likes best about working with Schwan’s is “they don’t have a corporate hierarchy in which it takes one year to make a decision.” That allows Puck to continue to tweak his pizza recipe. “I want it to be as close as possible to what you can get at Spago,” he adds. “I think we are almost there now.” |
Wolfgang Puck, famed restaurateur and chef, has been in the frozen-pizza business since the 1980s. But he didn’t go willingly, at first. « Previous Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
