GRAND UNION BRINGS ARTISAN BREAD TO VERMONT

ROSEANNE HARPER

MANCHESTER, Vt. -- The Grand Union Co. has brought a branded artisan bread that gained renown in New York City all the way to Vermont with the reopening of a remodeled store here.

The bread, Ecce Panis, which made a name for itself via its own Manhattan retail shops, got its debut in Grand Union stores in the NYC metropolitan area earlier this year. Fresh-baked Ecce Panis loaves are delivered daily to the grocery chain's units that lie within 100 miles of the bakery company's Carlstadt, N.J., production facility.

However, the advent of a new frozen, bake-off line that Ecce Panis developed this spring has made it possible to roll the bread out to stores outside its daily-delivery range and the Grand Union unit here is the first to get the new product, said Barbara Bacci, marketing director for Ecce Panis.

Indeed, taking on the bake-off products at its remodel here could signal the beginning of a rollout to more Grand Union units. The 225-unit chain has 130 stores with in-store bakeries. Officials at the chain could not be reached at press time, but in an earlier interview, Bill de Brauwere, Grand Union's director of bakery merchandising, told SN he was particularly pleased with the sales performance of the fresh-baked product in the chain's metro-area units.

"Without any promotion or advance notice to our customers, we sold out nearly the whole [display] cart of bread the first day we had it in one of our New Jersey stores," de Brauwere said in the spring when Grand Union rolled the product out to additional stores after a "very successful" sales test in four units.

The Grand Union unit here is offering five varieties of the new bake-off Ecce Panis line: raisin pecan, semolina, Tuscan boule, panne rustico, and classic focaccia.

Here, the branded breads join other bake-off breads in a 12-foot self-service section of wood racks in the in-store bakery. The Ecce Panis breads are set off from the others because they are displayed in brown craft paper bags bearing the Ecce Panis name and logo. The bags also offer nutrition information, net weight and are imprinted with a UPC code.

On grand reopening day here at the remodeled Grand Union unit recently, Ecce Panis employees offered customers tastes of the breads and provided them with descriptive brochures that tell the Ecce Panis story.

Ecce Panis offers 12 varieties in its frozen line -- the ones that are the best-sellers, fresh, in supermarkets, Bacci explained.

"They pretty much mirror the variety we deliver daily to New York metropolitan area supermarkets," she said, explaining that the frozen line was developed with supermarkets in mind.

"We had so many inquiries from supermarkets outside our daily-delivery area that we knew it would make sense to develop a frozen product so we could expand our distribution," Bacci said.

The bakery company created an additional production area at its 50,000-square-foot New Jersey plant this spring to accommodate the new line. The frozen products are shaped, pre-proofed, baked 80%, and then flash-frozen.