Excelling in Excelsior

A visit to the Kowalski’s Market in Excelsior, Minn. is a thrill ride for the senses. 

Shoppers can see the freshest meats, seafood, cheeses from around the world, handmade salads, store-made sushi, artfully decorated cakes and pastries, plus the largest selection of gourmet sandwiches in town. They can touch the freshest and newest items in produce, sourced daily from local farms. Smell fresh-baked breads and desserts, hot homemade soups and fresh-brewed Starbucks coffee. Hear proteins and veggies for made-to-order pasta dishes sizzle in the Pasta Bar’s frying pan; and taste mouthwatering samples throughout the store.

In fact, residents of Excelsior (population 2,397) have not had this much fun since before the famed Excelsior Amusement Park closed back in 1974. Kowalski’s, opened in July 2015, has quickly endeared itself to the community. One example, the annual Boo Bash—a trick-or-treat event held at each Kowalski’s store for three hours one afternoon a few days before Halloween—had almost 500 children in the Excelsior branch for its initial outing.    

Established in 1858 on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, 20 miles from Minneapolis, Excelsior became the Twin Cities’ main resort once a trolley line was extended from Minneapolis and the amusement park was built on an island off its terminus.

The trolleys and amusement park are long gone, but the town retains its quaintness. To this day a bull horn still goes off at 9 p.m. to remind residents of a long ago curfew. A half-mile stretch of Water Street running from the lake serves as the downtown, lined with antique shops, boutiques, restaurants, candy stores, a movie theater, old-fashioned pet shop, trolley museum—and now Kowalski’s. Sporting brick walls and multi-paned factory style windows, the store easily fits into Water Street’s eclectic architectural mix, and serves as downtown’s southern anchor.  

Its site was originally home to a Red Owl supermarket, the only supermarket in town. When it closed in the early 1980s, the building became the Mason Motors Chrysler dealership. Mason closed a few years ago and the building sat empty until developers approached Kowalski’s about opening a store.

“We ended up using just the west wall of the building, which is up against our produce and deli departments because there is a small [preexisting] strip mall on the other side,” says Mike Oase, vice president of operations at Kowalski’s Markets, based in Woodbury, Minn. “Originally we were going to leave the roof and three walls and build out this way (eastward), but when we got into it we saw the roof was pretty aged. It was structurally sound but would not be able to support the weight of our equipment.”

Kris Kowalski Christiansen, COO, notes that this is the first new store Kowalski’s has opened since 2008, its farthest west and, at 18,000 square feet, its smallest—outside of a 12,000 square-foot unique neighborhood store acquired years ago as part of a group acquisition. 

“We were still tasked with providing everything you can get at our other stores,” she says. “We had lots of meetings to figure out how to do that. We wanted this to be a full shop experience because this neighborhood was clamoring for a grocery store. They were so excited to get one back, and we wanted to deliver that to them.”

That was largely accomplished by cutting down on facings and SKU counts in center store.

“I know there are a lot of other smaller stores doing that, but this was our first shot at it, and we still wanted to maintain that nice variety that people are used to in our stores,” Kowalski Christiansen says. “We have to get the mainstream, so we have Cheerios, but we also want a specialty and natural/organic product in the same category.”

Company officials opted to install three-foot shelf sets instead of the traditional four-footers. “Three-foot allows us to be more creative on variety,” Oase says, “and our aisle height is nine inches lower than in our other stores. We wanted to go lower to give the store a nice, open feel, but we didn’t lose any variety because there was dead space there.”   

“You also get a better sightline,” says Mary Anne Kowalski, owner and Kris’ mom. “One of the comments we hear all the time from people is, ‘Wow! There is no fluorescent lighting. It is comfortable, calming, quiet, pretty, and that’s the idea. Plus, you can buy all this good stuff too.” 

Stepping through the front door, her words become obvious. Shoppers are greeted with an elaborate and eclectic gift department, albeit an extremely tailored selection compared to Kowalski’s other stores. 

“We have gift departments in all of our stores,” says Kowalski. “We’ve had them since back when my husband Jim and I decided that we couldn’t compete on a conventional level and that we would have to go upscale.”  

It neighbors the floral department, which Kowalski says “is always a big draw for us.”

World-class cheese

To the right is a huge island case overflowing with cheeses as close as neighboring Wisconsin and far away as New Zealand.

“We have an extensive department of imported cheese,” says Kowalski Christiansen. “That has been part of our brand for a long time, but we really extended it here.” She adds that the cheese director regularly travels the world looking for the best-in-class product.

In front of the gift department is produce. Locally and nationally Kowalski’s has built a reputation for offering its customers the best quality and newest produce items available. The department is filled with other proprietary items too. There is the watermelon tenderloin, a rindless heart of a watermelon, and semi-prepared green bean and sweet potato side dishes—created by suppliers to Kowalski’s specifications and recipes—that the consumer simply tosses into a microwave.

“We work with our produce vendors and talk about ‘Kowalski programs’ that we need,” says Kowalski Christiansen. “Take our packaged Brussels sprouts and diced butternut squash. We call them Steamers and cross-merchandise them with packaged chicken in our produce department to make it easy for the shopper.”     

Equally stellar is the bakery department just to the right, where the items are merchandised from custom-made unique fixtures. “Jeff Gardas, one of our maintenance professionals, is a woodworking expert and makes all of our cabinets and end caps,” says Kowalski.

She points to the proprietary Bombolini—the name translates into “calorie bomb” in Italian—over-stuffed jelly doughnuts. “We use really high quality ingredients,” Kowalski says. “Bakery is bakery and it is going to be a little fattening.”

Adds Kowalski Christiansen, “Know what is different about our cakes from other supermarkets? We use butter and we use butter and we use butter. We have so much butter coming out of our bakery—and no hydrogenated oils.”

The majority of the baked goods, as well as deli salads and entrées, are prepared in Kowalski’s production kitchen and commissary in Mahtomedi, Minn., and then finished off in the stores.

“We also like to work with local entrepreneurs,” says Kowalski Christiansen. “We carry local salad dressings, popcorn, candies from little chocolatiers. We have a new program we are testing and producing in our bakeries called the Church Lady’s Recipe. We call her ‘Church Lady’ because our bakery director met her at his church. She was producing these awesome breads for the church. She has a family recipe mix and comes in and trains our bakers on how to produce it. We sell it just on Fridays through Sundays.”

The service pastry counter, built by Gardas, is another amenity unique to the Excelsior store. 

“This is the first store to try a service pastry case,” says Kowalski Christiansen. “We have a pastry chef at our production facility and she was just helping us with our regular lines, but she really got to shine when we opened this store. She put together our program and came out and trained everyone.” 

Along the back wall, next to produce and beyond bakery is Kowalski’s extensive deli/prepared foods area.

An island features Kowalski’s famous made-from-scratch hot soups. “We are huge soup people. We grew up that way,” Kowalski Christiansen says. “We have the best soups on the market, and we have a big following for them.”

There is also a big following for Kowalski’s rotisserie chicken, an all-natural Amish bird that won a Best Chicken in the Twin Cities award from Mpls. St. Paul Magazine. “It is the biggest bird in town too,” says Kowalski. “Our chicken is roughly 50-ounces, while most of our competitors are in the 28-ounce range.”

The Pasta Bar, unique to Excelsior, is also quickly gaining a fan base. The service counter allows shoppers to create their own pasta dishes by picking a protein, vegetable, noodles and sauce.

Another first is the adjacent Carving Board sandwich station. While all Kowalski’s Markets feature custom-made sandwiches, Excelsior is the first to feature hot meats prepared in-house.

Next up is the prepared sandwiches case, featuring up to 20 different selections made fresh, in-house daily. “Their movement in this store has just been amazing,” says Kowalski Christiansen. “We’ll sell all of these today, and then make them over again.”

At least 25 different varieties of salads are in the next case, followed by an AFC-run sushi bar, and then the service-only meat department. Unlike most stores with service meat counters, this one is open the same hours as the rest of the store.

“In this store, we put in an all service meat department. We have no self-service meat,” says Kowalski, adding that the experiment is paying off. “It is much easier to open a store that way, rather than to take away a self-service case. This is a test here to see how it does, and it is doing fine. We believe in butchers and people who can cut and grind meat.” 

The chain’s meat specialist regularly visits the slaughterhouses to ensure the meat is processed safely and properly. 

“Our meat is all natural,” says Kowalski Christiansen. “The thing that drives us crazy from a marketing perspective is that everybody in town is saying that now, Cub included, but our all-natural has higher standards than the USDA. We don’t sell any meat with hormones or antibiotics ever.” 

Akaushi in the mist

A gentle mist rains down on the service case, keeping the meats nice and fresh, preventing the browning that befalls many a service department. The star of the department is Kowalski’s famed Akaushi beef.

“Akaushi beef is high in unsaturated fat versus saturated fat and it has an incredible story behind it. We are very proud to be able to carry it,” says Ryan Wojciak, meat/seafood manager. A small herd of cattle were shipped to one ranch in the U.S. and one in Australia in a specially outfitted 747 as part of a free trade agreement, he says, the first time this breed had ever left the island of Japan. 

“Even though Akaushi has that real intense marbling it is not heavy,” Wojciak says. “It is light and clean flavored and just makes you want to eat more.”

The case is filled with other unique creations, such as the Burger Bowl. “It is a three-quarter-pound ball of burger and we put a cavity in it, fill it with all sorts of good ingredients and then wrap it in bacon,” Wojciak says. 

The same care is taken at the adjacent service seafood case. Wojciak points out how Kowalski’s sources its farm-raised salmon from Canada’s Skuna Bay to alleviate consumer fears about the impact fish farming has on the environment. “An issue with farm-raised fish is that the excess feed sinks to the ocean floor underneath the pens and creates a bad environment, kind of like what happens in a home fish tank,” he says. “In Skuna Bay they have underwater cameras beneath the school of fish and when the food starts to sink past the school they shut off the feeding, reducing the amount of sediment incredibly.”        

Dairy runs along the back wall. In front of it is Kowalski’s frozen department. Unlike the long linear aisle found in other stores, Excelsior’s is a series of small aisles, evoking an almost boutique-like feel. “We think it is easier to shop that way,” Kowalski Christiansen says.

Grocery aisles are stocked with tailored selections. Only one three-foot set, for example, is devoted to pet foods. “We basically just have higher end pet foods because we had consumer meetings and asked what do they feed their dogs and what do you want us to carry,” says Kowalski.

One area where Kowalski’s has greatly been expanding its presence is private label. The Kowalski name adorns 1,537 products, including hot dogs, frozen pizzas, rice and bottled water sourced in Canada. “We have been building our brand for years and have a good mix of products,” says Kowalski Christiansen.     

Despite its small size, officials did manage to make room for a Starbucks counter up front, one of five in the company. It is doing brisk business and serves as a meeting place for residents.

The wine department is merchandised in a separate shop with access through the store vestibule, its high, dark-wood shelves filled with domestic, imported and local wines, craft beers and spirits. “In Minnesota you can’t have wine in the actual supermarket,” notes Kowalski Christiansen. 

Developing the Excelsior store was a challenge, says Kowalski Christiansen. “We had to figure out how to reach that many people where they can fill up a cart in that little space,” she says. “But we had already been thinking on how to cut down in grocery, so we had some plans and strategies in mind already. But it was really fun to finally get those planograms for grocery, dairy and frozen in a real setting and test our theories. So far it is working out.”

Healthy Choice

The average supermarket is stocked with tens of thousands of grocery items. Deciding which of those are the healthiest options can be quite the harrowing experience for shoppers—but not at Kowalski’s Markets. They simply look for the Good Foods for Good Health logo on in-store signage and shelf tags.   

Good Foods for Good Health is a proprietary “how-to” program designed by Kowalski’s officials that highlights foods throughout the store that have the right mix of nutrients and ingredients to help customers live strong and healthy lives.

In addition to being evaluated for nutrients and ingredients, Kowalski’s officials also take into account the amount of fat, sodium, cholesterol and added sugars in a food, and steer clear of artificial additives before bestowing a Good Foods for Good Health seal. 

“We have a nutritionist, Susan Moores, who goes through every recipe in our commissary and tells us if it fits the category for Good Foods for Good Health,” says Mary Anne Kowalski, president of the Woodbury, Minn.-based chain, pointing to a salad with the logo in the deli case. “Our whole idea was not to be so crazy with health in the sense that it has to taste good.”     

In addition to shelf tags and product signage, Kowalski’s has Good News cards posted throughout the store that alert shoppers about the latest health trends and news. For example, a card near the banana display will tell shoppers about studies showing an increase in potassium intake can limit or minimize the effects sodium has on raising blood pressure.

The program is further touted with weekend cooking demos, classes and articles in the store magazine, e-newsletter and on the Kowalski’s website. Each store also has a kiosk containing Good Foods for Good Health Dinner Tonight easy-to-prepare recipes.   

Check out some photos from GHQ executive editor Richard Turcsik's visit to Kowalski's Market: