SEAFOOD DEMOS A FRONT-AND-CENTER SUCCESS

Roseanne Harper

MELROSE PARK, Ill. -- Jewel-Osco, impressed by attendance at its seafood cooking classes in the past, expects record numbers of customers to attend its Lenten-season cooking sessions this year.

The classes are an annual event customers look forward to, and attendance every year has been on an upswing that keeps climbing. Held from 75 to 100 stores simultaneously, classes at the larger, high-volume stores draw as many as 100 people, and the average number to attend these classes is 58. That's up from an average in the 40s just two years ago, officials told SN last week.

"The seafood cooking class the week Lent begins is one of the most popular, maybe the most popular, of our cooking classes. Customers have already started asking if we're going to have them again this year," said Melissa Buoscio, corporate dietitian for the 275-unit Jewel-Osco, a division of Albertsons, Boise, Idaho.

By the middle of this month, the stores will have mounted signs in their windows and in their seafood departments, and they will be encouraging customers in-store to sign up for the classes -- set this year for March 4 and March 6.

"What's most amazing to me is that 91% to 95% of the people who sign up actually show up for these classes which are held from 7 to 8:30 in the evening on a weeknight, sometimes a very cold night," said Marian Minicone, vice president of marketing for Kit Moss Productions, the company that orchestrates Jewel-Osco's how-to cooking sessions. The Northbrook, Ill., production company, which has helped make the supermarket chain's classes a standout in the market area, goes to great lengths to engage the audience, Jewel-Osco's Buoscio said.

"They show them how to use four or five different recipes, using different kinds of fish, and sometimes scallops and shrimp, and everybody gets a sample."

She went on to describe how the production company's chefs fan out to 75 to 100 of Jewel-Osco's stores to conduct the classes on the two scheduled nights. The seafood manager in each store also speaks to the group and distributes a handout prepared by Buoscio.

"I emphasize the ways people can easily work seafood into their weekly menu by substituting fish for meat in their favorite recipes. I usually recommend the cookbooks by Evie Hansen at National Seafood Educators," said Buoscio, who said she thinks the classes are the ideal way to reach a large number of consumers.

Minicone said part of the drama of the presentations is that Jewel-Osco arranges for them all to be held in stores that have enough room on the sales floor -- preferably in the seafood department with the service case as a backdrop. Chairs are set up right in the aisle, facing a speaker's table where the show-and-tell chef is poaching or grilling whatever the featured products are, and in the meantime another chef is back in the store's kitchen, cooking up the same entree in larger volume. When the demo is over, the chef and associates come out of the kitchen carrying trays of little cups of the entree for everybody to sample.

"The timing really makes it quite a production. We try to make it fun, and everybody does love it. There's usually a raffle for something, maybe a cookbook, and they also get coupons for future seafood purchases. A lot of them hang around afterward and talk to Jewel's seafood manager and the chefs. The service seafood department is kept open until after the class so customers can buy the items they saw being cooked -- and many of them do right then," Minicone said.