RBA COMMITTEE TO PUSH PACZKIS

PAMELA BLAMEY

LAUREL, Md. -- The bakery treat known as the paczki is showing enough potential as a successful retail baking phenomenon that the Retailer's Bakery-Deli Association has decided to devote an entire committee to help expand marketing of the product.

As its first task, the committee will set up a marketing program for the paczki, and make it more accessible to supermarket in-store bakery departments.

Speaking of the appeal the paczki holds for retailers, Peter Houstle, executive vice president of RBA, said, "I guess it comes right down to numbers. In terms of bottom-line profit, [the paczki] has demonstrated some pretty phenomenal numbers.

"As a single product, it can do a whole lot for you in a very short period of time. For retail bakers, Christmas, Easter, graduation, etc., mean big bucks, but they're multiproduct events," Houstle explained. "Fat Tuesday is a one-product event; you make up six zillion of these things, and you make a ton of money." A traditional Polish pre-Lenten treat, the paczki (pronounced ponch-key) is a doughnut-like filled treat similar to the Berliner, usually offered just prior to Fat Tuesday. Carl Richardson, a former vice president of Hearth Oven Bakeries at Farmer Jack Supermarkets in Detroit and a longtime promoter of the paczki, will serve as paczki chairman at RBA.

Richardson has also chaired another pro-paczki group, the National Paczki Committee, Detroit.

"The program got so large and started feeding over into the other states that we just had to analyze it and say, OK, what method is best for this thing in the future to give something back to the industry and promote the industry?" Richardson said.

"So we agreed to roll it into

RBA and they agreed to take it. I'm in the process right now of setting up a system and a structure that will accommodate the market nationally," Richardson added.

"And I'm putting together an 800 number, [connecting to] a contract mailing house which will mail a paczki promotional kit to all the [retail] end users that request it, free of charge."

Kits will contain point-of-sale material and all available literature from manufacturers of paczki components, such as frozen dough, mix and the finished product, Richardson said.

Point-of-sale materials will include shelf talkers, streamers and door posters. Houstle told SN he expects the promotional kit to be available in November.

"The program culminates on Feb. 20, and what we're trying to do now is make available to the nation a very high-quality promotional kit that gives people all the tools they need to make a lot of money off paczkis," Houstle said.

The promotional program will start off concentrating on several key regions. "We're going to be going into market areas to provide some kind of additional regional advertising," Houstle said. "Initially, we're looking at the Newark/New York metropolitan area, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio.

"That's really what our idea is -- to work with retailers, to get them to participate in the promotional process, radio advertising, billboards, etc. And then over time, the goal is to make it more national [in scope]."

Both Richardson and RBA officials see the potential for paczkis to spearhead a holiday selling season in February on a par with Christmas or Easter.