Persitza Shifts Priority With Food For All

CHRISTINA VEIDERS

SAN DIEGO — Steve Persitza, Food For All's vice president of sales and marketing in the Western region, knows firsthand about food industry consolidation. It brought him to Food For All nearly 10 years ago after a 20-year career with Hughes Family Markets, Irwindale, Calif.

In the late 1990s, Persitza saw Hughes sold to Quality Food Centers, Bellevue, Wash., only to have QFC go to Fred Meyer, Portland, Ore., a short time later and then merge with Kroger, Cincinnati, in 1999, resulting in the conversion of Hughes stores to the Ralphs banner.

At the time, Persitza, a GM/HBC category manager for Hughes, was offered a severance package and took it. He had experienced the typical grassroots ascent in the grocery business by starting at age 17 as a box boy for Hughes, going on to various supervisory positions, including assistant store manager, before moving into corporate.

“In the store, you are being told directives, and in corporate you are creating those directives. So I had a good balance of what can work in-store and what is more difficult to accomplish,” he said.

Persitza had the right credentials when he saw an ad in the Los Angeles Times for a person with grocery experience who understood the business from management as well as operations. The position was for a sales manager for Food For All. “I worked for 20 years trying to make money to help profit. Now the bottom line is to help people. The motivation is still to perform, but the outcome is to help people.”

Persitza services about 50 Food For All corporate accounts with 9,000 stores that are located mainly west of the Mississippi. While the majority of funding goes to local food banks, numerous other causes are funded as well, including job training, women's shelters, AIDS patients, runaway services and before- and after-school programs. All of the recipients are food-related, said Persitza. “If you don't have a job and are trying to get one, chances are you're not eating properly and not staying healthy. If you are a woman escaping from an abusive relationship, and are seeking shelter, food is part of that, too. We support a runaway youth organization in San Francisco, and food is part of that. Our funding can cover the gamut, and we tell retailers they have a lot of flexibility with our program.”

That is why the year-round program can become a valuable funding resource, said Persitza. “Most retailers will tell you they are bombarded with big and small requests for funding from local groups. The year-round program works because funds are always being generated.”

Over the last decade, Persitza has seen Food For All go from a one-stop shop, where promotional materials are produced to fit all, to an agency approach, where each retailer participant is given individual attention and programs are designed to meet their specific needs. “It was a united cause, and it worked for a time. But there were so many mergers over the last 10 years. A lot of companies acquired so many different banners, and each would have its own company culture,” he explained.

Suddenly, supermarkets wanted to brand the united cause of hunger relief as their own. Computerized printing technology came to the rescue to allow Food For All to cost-effectively customize each partner's program.

Persitza said an emotional attachment results from producing graphics that brand a company to the cause. “We discovered the store and its employees seem to own the program. It is not the same as the fund-raiser down the street. Anytime you can get some emotional attachment, you have a better opportunity of employees sharing with their customers to help their community,” he explained.

The biggest challenge in the effort is to keep supermarket partners and their store associates engaged and excited about the program, Persitza said. Food For All concentrates on the design of new graphical material, and it generates public relations announcements. “We work with each account differently to create excitement from year to year,” he said.

The checkout clerk is a critical link to the program's success. “I know that more than most people, because I've worked in a grocery store. At some point it comes down to the human level and interaction with customers,” Persitza noted. However, with partners that have been with Food For All for as long as 20 years, the organization has become a familiar and highly recognizable nonprofit for many supermarket associates and their customers.