THAT'S EATERTAINMENT!

LYNNE MILLER

When retailers knock down walls and open up production areas, they create theater on the store floor -- and the show becomes a destination for customers who appreciate freshly made food and live action.

The disciples of showtime wouldn't make food any other way. Rotisserie ovens, tortilla machines, doughnut makers, grills -- they all play important parts as merchandisers of freshness.

At Holiday Market, Canton, Mich., customers walk in the door and react to the sights -- and the smells. There's bread baking in a 40,000-pound Farjas brick oven, peanuts roasting in the produce department, fish and sausage being smoked behind the meat counter, coffee roasting, and chickens turning inside a rotisserie oven.

Store owner John Pardington said he has regular customers, including many "foodies" who travel more than an hour to shop at the store, an upscale 50,000-square-foot independent west of Detroit.

"I'm a big believer in getting sizzle right out on the floor," Pardington said. "That's an important aspect to selling stuff. People buy with their eyes, nose and mouth."

And ears. He plans to install a big brass bell in the bakery, which will ring every time a loaf of bread comes out of the oven.

"I hope to have them salivating like Pavlov in a couple of months," he said.

The handcrafted brick oven measures 10 feet in diameter and is a focal point at the store [see "Holiday Unit's Brick Oven Set to Raise Bread Sales," SN, Aug. 31, 1998]. The igloo-shaped chamber has a huge round stone in the center that holds heat and provides an "oven spring," allowing the bread to rise immediately. When Holiday Market was still under construction in 1998, Pardington told SN the oven takes 10 days to attain the 400-degree optimum cooking temperature, using wood. Once it is stoked, he said, it's never extinguished, but maintained during off hours at a lower temperature.

When this store opened, the oven produced a handful of varieties of bread. Now it turns out close to 40 types -- from peasant breads to specialty loaves like kalamata olive and cracked peppercorn. Holiday makes 3,000 to 4,000 loaves every week, ranging in price from $1.89 for a baguette, to $5 for a loaf of dried cherry or walnut pecan.

Of course, many retailers have met with great success without installing an imported brick oven -- using parbaked or frozen dough -- but Pardington is a purist. When he visits other stores, he said he frequently sees bread baking in public areas. Yet for all the effort that goes into the show, the quality of the product is lacking, he said.

"They've added a little theater, but it's the same loaf of bread, a frozen bake-off loaf that wasn't that good to begin with." And all the theater in the world cannot compensate for inferior quality, he added.

For some retailers, the combined challenges of labor, food safety and maintenance create an insurmountable hurdle in regards to equipment and theatrical production. That's why some observers told SN they see less show in supermarkets these days.

In his travels as manager of deli systems for Hobart, the Troy, Ohio-based equipment manufacturer, Kent Kazmaier said he's observed less theater. When he's asked retailers why they don't have their rotisseries running between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. -- prime time for capturing sales from the hungry, after-work crowd -- store officials said their employees want to clean up and shut down the ovens before ending their shifts at that time.

In certain markets, Kazmaier said, local authorities require supermarkets to put their rotisserie ovens, electric as well as gas models, under hoods, and that limits where the stores can locate the fixtures.

"It's easier for them to push it against a back wall," he said. "Customers don't get to see it like they normally would."

Another manufacturer agreed that labor has been the primary reason retailers have scaled back on theater, and placed greater reliance on equipment that can do more with less oversight.

"The only theater I've witnessed is people taking products out of ovens and that's not much theater," said Judy Nagel, national sales manager for Alto-Shaam, Menomonee Falls, Wis. "It takes more highly trained personnel.

"The cost is the labor," she said. "How much volume will that increase? Will it pay for itself? It becomes a bottom-line kind of thing."

If there is any one piece of equipment retailers are willing to work with -- regardless of production challenges -- it's the rotisserie oven, since chicken continues to be a mainstay of most supermarket fresh-meals programs.

Indeed, rotisserie chicken remains one of the top-selling prepared chicken products sold by supermarkets. The roasted birds were among the top five products purchased at food stores or food-service establishments this year, according to the results of a survey of 1,000 consumers conducted this year by the National Chicken Council, Washington.

Some 25 to 30 units in the Minyard Food Stores chain have rotisserie ovens in their deli departments, either behind counters or along walls, but always in view of shoppers. Here, rotisserie chicken sales are up about 10% this year over the previous year, thanks in large part to advertised 50 cents-off specials, according to a chain official.

"The supermarket owns that item," said John Highbaugh, director of food service for the Coppell, Texas-based chain, and an admitted fan of in-store theater. "It's a supermarket icon. There's barely a restaurant in the world that does it."

He thinks convenience -- and the product's uniqueness to supermarkets -- make rotisserie a strong seller.

"We like our rotisseries to be visible," he said. "If something is moving, it's more exciting to watch. It also tells the customer they really do cook the chickens here and they're fresh."

Customers pick up the fully cooked chickens in plastic dome-topped containers, displayed on hot tables near the ovens.

Six months ago, Holiday Market introduced a new player -- fully cooked turkey breast -- to its cast. Customers see turkey breasts turning on skewers, in the same rotisserie oven that roasts whole chickens nonstop throughout the day. Holiday sells 150 rotisserie chickens every day, Pardington said. The store's oven is equipped with five skewers, and can accommodate up to 20 chickens at a time. It sits on top of a hot, self-serve case that displays the packaged, fully cooked birds and turkey breasts.

To make cleanup easy, employees use foil on the cooking areas of the oven, Pardington said. That step makes it possible to clean the appliance in about 30 minutes.

Aside from the deli, there's open production in the bakery at four Carnival Food Stores, also operated by Minyard. The format takes theater a step further with tortilla machines -- including two machines large enough to fill a living room. They run all day, seven days a week. These machines, in stores that cater to Hispanic shoppers, are a fixture in the bakery departments.

"You can't make tortillas at home like this," said Highbaugh. "Customers really do appreciate the fact that they can walk in our stores and get hot tortillas any time they want."

It takes three employees to operate a machine, and they receive special training in the tortilla-making process, as well as safety instructions.

The U-shaped model is about 20 feet long by 12 feet wide. And while it is a large piece of equipment with many fast-moving parts, requiring constant adjustment and cleaning, it still manages to be user-friendly, Highbaugh said.

Whereas the tortilla machines require continuous cleaning, rotisserie ovens are cleaned after each batch of chickens, and the process takes about 90 minutes, Highbaugh said. Keeping the equipment clean is one of the biggest challenges to open-food production, he added. "You're trying to operate clean and sometimes that's difficult," Highbaugh said. "When you do a visible production, you simply take a wall down. It doesn't change the work environment that much. It probably makes you more conscious of what's going on around you. You've got to be a little neater."

Cleaning and maintenance are important -- but frequently overlooked -- factors in equipment-purchasing decisions. Retailers who give short shrift to those issues will be sorry later, said Brian Salus, a Richmond, Va., food industry consultant with a background in store and kitchen design.

"How many times have you seen a rotisserie when a store opens, or at a show -- and the unit is beautiful," he said. "Three months later, it is crusted and gritty because it isn't cleaned or maintained, or it was not designed well for cleaning."

And, while equipment must be user-friendly, those who operate the device must be equipment-friendly, too. Employee training plays a key role in open production, according to a Rochester, N.Y., industry consultant and alumnus of Wegmans Food Markets.

When he trains supermarket employees, Jim Frackenpohl of RL & Associates -- Retail Food Design drills them on the fine points of merchandising and food safety, among other lessons. Employees also must be extremely comfortable and confident working in the open, and talking to customers, he said.

"The tricky part is getting people who can multitask," he said. "It's like running a bar. You have to talk to customers, make the beverages, be ready to jump in. You have to have high-energy output."

This inability of supermarkets to attract and retain qualified help is unfortunate, according to Minyard's Highbaugh. "I hope that changes," he said. "Our labor pool has been difficult. That may make some people think [theater] will be a little more difficult to do.

"I'm of the opinion you're either going to do it in the back room or the front room," Highbaugh said. "Visibility creates an environment that's more exciting."

Of course, certain production activities just don't make for good show. Based in Sheboygan, Wis., Piggly Wiggly Stores are known for their homemade doughnuts. The stores have been frying bismarcks, raised, cake and several other doughnut varieties for close to 20 years, and nearly all units have a fryer in the back room.

Some years back, one or two stores took doughnut production out front. One franchiser in particular "did a good job with it," said Candy Kornitz, director of bakery and deli merchandising for the chain, which has 97 units, including 27 corporate-owned stores.

But store officials realized the selling floor was too valuable to give away to frying and icing doughnuts, which require several feet of space. "It's also a messy operation," Kornitz said. So production was moved to the back of the store, where appearances are not quite so important.

But theater doesn't have to be high-tech and complicated at all. At some Harris Teeter stores, including those in the suburban Raleigh, N.C., and Washington areas, employees operate a convection oven, set up on a table, to bake bread and cookies on the bakery floor. The oven can hold up to 10 pans of cookies, or five sheet pans of baguettes.

"We're seeing results," a source with the Matthews, N.C.-based retailer told SN. "It's an activity center. Customers gravitate toward activity centers, and any time you can get stuff out in front of customers, you'll sell it."