Wegmans has the recipe for featuring unique local products

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If you happen to be shopping at your neighborhood Wegmans Food Markets and come across a woman taking selfies with products in the frozen food section, don’t be alarmed.

It’s probably Sarah Cookfair. She says she still not quite accustomed to seeing the soups created by her and her husband, Alex, on display in the Wegmans freezers.

Which is why she admits she has been known to drop by one of the area stores for a peek, even if she’s not out grocery shopping.

“I was already a big Wegmans fan,” Cookfair said, “but now I find myself pulling over just to go into the store and take pictures. I don’t know if it will ever wear off.”

Sarah and Alex own Finger Foods Farm, an organic vegetable farm in West Bloomfield that also makes soups. Three varieties — butternut squash, southwest vegetable and Tuscan bean — made their debut in Wegmans in late January and a fourth is on the way.

For the Cookfairs, placement on the shelves at Wegmans provides significant exposure. For Wegmans, it’s a chance to offer consumers a locally sourced product that fits a shopping niche.

“It’s important to our customers; it’s important to our stores,” said Tim Mahan, grocery merchandising group manager for Wegmans. “Part of being a community-based retailer is offering the best local things and offering a meaningful choice to customers.

“When we look at the assortment of products in a category, we try to have a meaningful, carefully curated collection of products. Part of what customers want to see are local products.”

The process of going from restaurant kitchen or grandma’s kitchen with a locally-made product to the grocery aisle at Wegmans is extensive. Not just any salsa, soup or steak sauce is given a spot on the shelves.

Wegmans has category merchants for each product category in its stores (cereal, refrigerated foods, etc.). The merchants are tasked with understanding the products available, along with trends and innovations, Mahan said.

“But we’re also customers and consumers ourselves,” Mahan said, “so I might see something at the public market or have had a great experience at a restaurant and then I’m seeing that restaurant selling a sauce or what not. You reach out and try to make connections.”

Wegmans’ working relationship with Cornell University‘s Center of Excellence for Food and Agriculture paired Finger Foods Farm with the grocer.

“Cornell knew we were interested in the category of frozen soup and we’re also interested in supporting local produce,” Mahan said. “Here were entrepreneurs using local produce to make small-batch frozen soup. That’s a category we weren’t really carrying a lot of choices in, and customers like to buy local.”

The Cookfairs started their farm in Bloomfield about three years ago and were avid makers of healthy soup for their own family meals.

“We wanted to create a reliable market for our products and other farmers in the area, plus we made a lot of soups because we have picky eaters as kids and they’ll eat soup,” Sarah Cookfair said. “We thought, ‘Why not bring the two together?’”

Going from the stove in their kitchen to the Wegmans freezers was no easy task, however. They needed to source vegetables from beyond their own farm. The garlic in the Tuscan bean soup, for instance, comes from Mele Garlic Farms in Holley.

Then there was figuring out where the soups would be produced and packed, what packaging would work best, how to get the fresh-picked vegetables to the co-packer and then how to get the soup from production run to Wegmans freezers.

Wegmans provided help at every step.

“They were great to work with,” Cookfair said. “They talked us through the R&D stage to be sure we created something that matched their vision.”

Of course, the Gates-based grocery has been working with local labels for decades, so their teams know the ins and outs of every process.

“Wegmans part of this process is taking a good idea and fine-tuning it a little bit, helping them figure out the supply chain,” Mahan said.

“A key part of this relationship is our work with a distributor (in this case, River Valley Foods of Syracuse). Once we have a product that we think customers will like and will be looking for, we have to figure out how we’re going to get it to the store shelves and replenish it.”

There also is the packaging. It not only must have eye appeal, but it must be durable. The initial concept considered by Finger Foods Farm wasn’t deemed adequate.

“We felt the original packaging they had might not hold up well in our frozen food supply chain, so they made some modifications,” Mahan said. “We also worked together on the size of the product they were trying to sell so we could hit a retail price point that would be attractive to customers and a size, a value proposition, which would work for all of us.

“We’re taking their good recipe and product and they’re taking some input from us to try to make it as viable a product as possible on the shelf.”

Cookfair believes Finger Foods Farm soups fit the bill.

“Our soups are jam-packed with a lot of vegetables,” Sarah said. “You can feel they’re hearty just looking at them. They can be a side, or they can be a meal.

“You should feel full after eating healthy food, otherwise you’re just going to eat more.”

She said providing a frozen soup maintains a more savory, right-off-the-stove flavor. Canned soups, she said, “end up very processed soup tasting.”

The soups are manufactured and packaged by Nathan’s Co-packing LLC in Henrietta. That’s the same company behind a long-time Rochester staple, Nathan’s Soup & Salad. But these soups are 100 percent Finger Foods Farm.

“It is our recipe that we make in our kitchen, so that’s why it was important to find the right co-packer,” Cookfair said. “Not only are they great co-packers but they’ve been making soup for a long time.”

Before the soup itself ever has a chance to hook consumers, there needs to be attractive packaging, so plenty of thought went into the label.

“How do you convey to them in a glance at a label the story?” Sarah said. “We wanted something that would catch someone’s eye and feel authentic to who we are.”

The Finger Foods Farm logo itself (found on the back of the jar) was created by a family friend, Tim Taranto, and depicts vegetables in the alignment of the Finger Lakes.

Now that the soups are in nearly 80 Wegmans stores, the next step is making sure consumers know.

“We are seeing some sales out of the gate, and now our task over the next six months is to really build the volume so they can maintain their place on the shelf,” Mahan said.

“Half the battle is getting on the shelf, and the other half of the battle is making sure you have enough sales volume to justify staying on the shelf.”

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