ORDERING PIZZAZZ

ROSEANNE HARPER

Do "gourmet" and "pizza" belong together in supermarket delis?

After several years of experimenting with fancy toppings like goat cheese and artichokes, retailers are still asking whether they shouldn't stick with the perennial best sellers, cheese and pepperoni.

The answer, according to several retailers polled by SN, lies somewhere in the middle. It pays to have a few snazzy varieties to liven up a pizza program, they're finding, but not too many at one time.

Some retailers said they have a menu of more than a dozen special pizzas, but feature only a few at a time. Others, however,

see added variety as key to setting themselves apart from local competition, as well as from products offered in the frozens case.

"We've cut back to five slightly unusual, but not too unusual, varieties which we offer every day. It makes inventory-keeping, sales-tracking and labeling easier and still fits with our upscale image," said Elizabeth Little, president of V. Richard's, Brookfield, Wis. She added that V. Richard's makes custom-order pizzas in addition to those they display.

"A year ago we were offering eight to 10 upscale toppings in an 8-foot case, but we've cut that down to 4 feet and now have fresh pasta and sauces and some other items in the other half of the case," Little said.

"I think sometimes the more space you have, the more apt the case is to get disheveled and also the customer tends to think items have been sitting there a while too long if he sees a large display. Now we restack more often, and cutting the display hasn't had a negative effect. Sales have grown," she added. The retailer is offering "slightly unusual varieties," such as grilled chicken and Greek and wild mushroom, Little said.

Jack Murdock, director of deli operations for 79-unit Minyard Food Stores, Coppell, Texas, said he's in favor of adding new varieties. "Changing varieties frequently is one of the keys to a successful pizza program, and adding new ones attracts attention. We just added two more and we're looking at making a breakfast pizza," he said.

"You'd better offer something different or you'll lose 25% of the pizza customers you could have had," said Fred DiQuattro, director of deli, bakery, seafood and food service for Riser Foods, Bedford Heights, Ohio.

The company, which operates 44 Rini-Rego supermarkets, recently launched a gourmet pizza program in all its units. "It represents added pizza sales for us, and the margin's better than on traditional toppings," DiQuattro said. While Riser's margin on cheese and pepperoni pizzas is 50% to 52%, it's nearly 60% on gourmet varieties, he said.

DiQuattro, who said Riser will definitely expand gourmet pizza into new and remodeled stores, said he sees a tremendous potential for the category, especially with health-oriented shoppers. "Customers equate 'gourmet' with 'healthy' these days," he said. Wegmans Food Markets, Rochester, N.Y., hasn't made any recent changes in its gourmet pizza program, but that's because it's doing "exceptionally well just as it is," said James Riesenburger, director of deli operations for the 47-unit chain.

The chain has 50 some pizza toppings in its repertoire and offers eight to 12 varieties a day.

"We made a conscious decision to offer a wide range of toppings when we started the program," Riesenburger said, adding that he sees continuing potential for upscale pizza. "Pizza is a universal food, but one that's so versatile. It's a never-ending source of creativity. The pizza of the future, I think, will be vegetable-based without cheese, maybe with something like a sun-dried tomato paste as a base," Riesenburger said.

At 23-unit Genuardi Super Markets, Norristown, Pa., Bob Cappuccio, director of deli-bakery operations, said, "What we have over the family pizza parlors around here is display space and traffic, and we make sure we have 12 pizzas displayed every day."

Three gourmet varieties are offered each day at its newest store in St. David's, Pa. The retailer launched a gourmet pizza program there a little more than a year ago, and it has kept 30% ahead of sales projections all along, Cappuccio said.

"What has surprised me is the movement of the whole 14 varieties we offer," he said, when asked which varieties have been surprise successes or failures. The variety includes such toppings as barbecued chicken and bacon, pesto and salmon, sausage scallopini and sun-dried tomatoes with zucchini. Other retailers had good words for their all-vegetable-topping pizzas. "They're pretty. They sell themselves," said one deli director for a Midwest chain, who chose to not be identified.

And DiQuattro said Riser's fresh tomato and basil topping is a best seller. "It looks so good in the case," he said. "We use large tomatoes and cut them an eighth of an inch thick." "Any deli with a pizza program should make an eye-catching vegetable pizza. Everybody has a produce department. That would be an easy one."

But not all shoppers are flocking to vegetables. Riesenburger at Wegmans said lasagna pizza is much more successful than he would have expected it to be.

That variety, featuring sausage in its topping, has all the ingredients of traditional lasagna minus the pasta. Along with the sausage, the topping contains ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. The lasagna pizza, currently part of the chain's pizza repertoire, is offered frequently as one of the eight to 12 varieties featured daily.

"It's a good-selling pizza here," said a source at the pizza station in a Wegmans store in Webster, N.Y.

Like all the chain's gourmet varieties, it is $2.19 a slice. A 17-inch gourmet pie is $13.99.

Shredded barbecued beef pizza is an unexpected top-selling variety at a Cedar Falls, Iowa unit of Hy-Vee Food Stores, Chariton, Iowa.

"Pineapple pizza also is a bigger hit than I thought it would be," said Steve Miller, store manager there, where pizza is made from scratch.

Hy-Vee Stores, with 150-plus units, has a mixture of scratch and component pizza programs throughout the chain. At a Newton, Iowa, unit with component program a "Hawaiian pizza" featuring pineapple slices is a good seller, said Allen Dix, store manager there.

Other retailers spoke of pineapple and Canadian bacon toppings as surprise successes.

There have been some failures, too. One variety at Riser Foods that bombed was artichokes and sun-dried tomatoes. That was an early experiment, "but it didn't work because the shell was penetrated by moisture from the vegetables," said DiQuattro.

He said he learned a lesson from that. "We blanch our fresh vegetables for topping and then refrigerate them, which takes much of the moisture out, but you can't do that with sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil."

He added that Riser cuts florets of cauliflower and broccoli and places them on top of a finer-chopped vegetable topping after it has been spread on the pizza shell. More often it is its attractiveness or lack of visual appeal that seals a pizza topping's fate.

"There's no way we would sell any Reuben pizza if we didn't sample it," said Jeffrey O'Neill, manager of newly remodeled Boyer's Super Valu in Womelsdorf, Pa. "It doesn't look too good. You have to taste it."

Sauerkraut, corned beef and Swiss cheese are the ingredients in the recently introduced Reuben pizza.

Sampling is key to selling any of the out-of-the-ordinary varieties, retailers agreed.

"We've been conjuring up a new topping each week and we sample it every day," O'Neill said. The store, one unit of Boyer's, an eight-unit independent, was designed for emphasis on fresh, ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat foods.

The gourmet varieties of pizza are seen by O'Neill and other retailers as offering a whole or main-meal alternative.

"There's a niche for these varieties. People who wouldn't make a main meal out of traditional topping pizza take these home for dinner," said Murdock at Minyard.

And Little at V. Richard's said, "Traditional pizza has had a bad reputation as heavy, or not healthy, but that's not so with the unusual varieties." She added that she could see people serving V. Richard's upscale pizza to dinner guests.