PRICE CHOPPER'S COOKED KABOB GAINS SALES

Roseanne Harper

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. -- Price Chopper Supermarkets' own, ready-to-eat chicken kabobs have taken off this summer.

The kabobs, offered in more than half of the chain's stores, got their debut in June but the exposure they received during the July Fourth week and at a recent community event kicked up sales in the weeks following and they continue to grow, officials said.

Feedback from customers is particularly gratifying, according to chain officials, who added that customers like the price, too.

"[The rotisserie-cooked kabob program] is doing extremely well. To me, it was a very logical addition to our Roasters line," said Dave Hamlin, food-service program developmental specialist for the chain. "With Roasters, we do a very strong business in rotisserie chickens, turkey breasts, wings and fried chicken."

Hamlin, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who's been with the chain about 10 years, has developed pot pies and several other extensions of Roasters, a program centered around impressive-looking, imported Rotisol rotisseries in 70-some Price Chopper units.

"With this, we wanted to capture that really fun, spring-summer quality of kabobs. Customers in this time-starved society just don't have the time anymore to go home during the week and do the marinating, the cutting, putting them on a stick, all that, and then grilling them," he added.

That's how Roasters itself got started, according to the chef. "People just didn't have time to roast a chicken anymore."

Judging by the positive responses the chain is receiving from customers, the kabobs' sales potential has hardly been touched yet, Hamlin said. Customers keep talking about the flavor, and that part is easily attributable to Hamlin's secret-recipe marinade, other sources at Price Chopper told SN.

Boneless chicken breasts are marinated for a time in the special concoction. Then they're cut into chunks and skewered along with carrots, purple onions, and green and red peppers. Everything is done at store level -- marinating, cutting, skewering and roasting.

"We designed and developed the kabobs to certain specs so that when the product comes off the rotisserie, everything on the skewer is at the same level of doneness. We also had to use vegetables that would hold up. The kabobs have a tendency to bounce in the rotisserie's baskets as they go around. I tried mushrooms but they didn't hold up, and squash performed so-so at best. Cherry and grape tomatoes just exploded," Hamlin said.

He said he got comments like this from store-level associates about using carrots on the kabobs: Who uses carrots on kabobs? Why carrots? The answer is simple: Hamlin loves roasted carrots and besides that, they look pretty. They aren't even blanched before they hit the rotisserie.

"We don't blanch any of the vegetables because you lose some of the flavor. You want that full, roasted flavor. You lose some of the bite, too, with blanching, and the bite is something I like. You start with clean flavor of the fresh vegetable -- it's not marinated -- and then you get the nice pick-up flavor from the marinated meat."

He pointed out that the kabobs offer convenience as well as good taste, quality and value, and apparently customers agree. People buy them to eat for lunch and sometimes pick up a couple to take home for dinner. The retail price: $3.59 each.

"We like to price things 'by the each' if we possibly can, so the customer knows what he's going to be paying when he comes in. It won't be one price today, and something different tomorrow," Hamlin said.

The kabobs are threaded onto a traditional, 12-inch, bamboo skewer, with four sets of chicken and vegetables in that foot of skewer. That brings the product's total, finished weight from 14 to 16 ounces. That's the plan.

"It's meant to be one serving, but it depends on a person's eating habits, or the size of the person. For instance, I can eat a whole one, but my wife can eat probably only about half," Hamlin said.

The rather hefty kabobs can hardly be missed in the hot case. Indeed, a platter of them serves as the centerpiece, catching the customer's eye from quite a distance away.

"We use BKI hot holding cases, and when we wrote the program, we said the focal point of that case should be a platter with the kabobs stacked up like a pyramid, if you will. We lay, say, five kabobs on the platter, then four on top of those and then three on top of those. It is just one pyramid of color."