#152 Fighting Through COVID and Winning - Lori Hunter, New Seasons

In 2000, three families got together to open a neighborhood market, a place where local communities could come together to connect with where their food came from. They wanted a friendly, inviting place that honored its region’s farmers, ranchers, growers and makers—helping them – and their customers – prosper for generations to come. They called it New Seasons Market. A previous New Seasons guest on our show, Lori Hunter whose title is Local Finds and Culinary Events Program Manager (say that three times in a row fast) joins our host Sarah Marshall to talk about the difference in operating their grocery store chain now, in comparison to her first, pre-COVID lockdown interview. Loris starts by saying that having an online presence has been one of the biggest changes since then. The shift worked well for New Seasons as people went to online shopping and grocery store pickup, because the company had aligned with Instacart early on. New Seasons also has a dedicated e-commerce team that worked with its vendor partners to load their product pictures and pricing information onto the website to keep sales moving. And to go the extra mile, New Seasons put its local vendor products on end caps and helped their vendor partners develop new recipes to stimulate sales. In the beginning of the COVID lockdown, they limited the number of people in the store and had all the social distance, masks, hand sanitizers and dots on the floor to keep customers and staff super safe as no one was sure what was going to happen. One of the big curve balls the lockdown threw to grocers was the proverbial toilet paper “shortage”. The grocery store that was popular was the store with toilet paper, right? But when the TP started getting distributed again, delivery trucks were full with nothing but TP, because the boxes were so large. This, of course, created a shortage of other products because there was no room left on the truck. But because New Seasons’ vendor profile has always been local makers and growers, their deliveries of cheese, fish, meat, vegetables, wine, fruit and all the other great foods didn’t change and they dodged the rows of empty shelves that many other grocers faced. Another big change was the traditional in-store sampling. The lockdown made the New Seasons’ team take a new look at staffing structure for that activity. Their previous formula was to let people in each store conduct sampling activities spontaneously and was heavily recipe driven. As Lori’s title of culinary events demonstrates, sampling is now arranged as a promoted and targeted event company wide. As an example, the chain recently promoted sockeye salmon in their sampling to create a great customer experience revolving around trying something new, liking it and buying it. The salmon is local and in addition, New Seasons promotes the sauces and spices to go along with the recipes and those are also locally sourced. And this cooperative spirit comes back to New Seasons: Their local vendor partners create recipes for the promoted items on their own social networks and wrap the effort around the item being sold at New Seasons Market. It all works to support the company’s mission: To build community through good food. Go to their website for a great experience: https://www.newseasonsmarket.com/. Social media: IG@newseasonsmarket. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.

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Producer: Sarah Marshall of The Joy of Creation Production House
Audio engineer, mixer, and podcast editor: Haley Bowers
Show logo designed: Anton Kimball of Kimball Design
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