In Veracruz's Mercado Central, shaggy cinnamon quills, bottles of "virgin" honey,
baskets of chiles, and earthenware pots create a memorable scene--the opposite
of what you'll find at Penzeys' retail spice stores.
I really like Penzeys’ spices. Just inhaling the rich, aromatic scent of the Whole Special Extra Bold Indian Black Peppercorns—only 10 pounds of every ton makes the grade—conjures up fantastic visions of marigold garlands, bright crimson saris and plump pepper berries ripening on leafy vines in the verdant hills and valleys of Kerala. These are the peppercorns I use everyday, whether I’m making a simple vinaigrette for tonight’s salad, or pulling out all the stops with fiery Singapore Black Pepper Crab.
So I’ve been wondering why Penzeys’ retail stores are so banal. The one in Grand Central Station, with its neat rows of hermetically sealed jars, has all the antiseptic allure of a suburban vitamin shop (especially if you recall the wildly exotic Adriana’s Caravan that once occupied the same space.) And why does Penzeys’ catalogue channel Woman’s Day circa-1975 recipes like Tuscan Chicken Bake (chicken, vegetables, tomato sauce and Tuscan Sunset Salt Free Italian Style Seasoning). And why…oh well, you get the picture.
In “Milling Profits from Spice” by Fawn Fitter (Fortune Small Business, October 2007, pp. 65-68), 44-year-old Bill Penzey tells how he built a successful empire—32 stores, 600,000 mail order customers, revenues in the “tens of millions of dollars“—by making spices accessible to the average home cook. Says Penzey: “I’ve heard folks passing by a spice store say, ‘That’s not for me; it’s for gourmets.’” From a survey he discovered that more than 50 percent of his “core mail order customers ate out fewer than six times a month…. We found that our customers are families who were cooking skinless chicken breasts 20 times a month…it was important to remind them of the basics: By using a variety of spices, you can create new meals with essentially the same main ingredients.”
I guess that’s the answer. Like Starbucks, Penzeys has taken an extraordinary product and dumbed it down for a mass audience. That would account for the rapid roll-out of bland retail stores, the resolutely “non-gourmet” approach to recipes, and the profusion of similar spice blends which can be dumped over boneless, skinless chicken breasts 20 times a month. It also accounts for the dismissive comments about celebrity chefs and the media in One, a subscription-only magazine that proudly trumpets recipes and food stories from “real people.”
The irony is that Penzeys’ single spices—incendiary peppercorns from India and Malaysia, fragrant vanilla beans from Mexico and Madagascar, soft, lemony cinnamon from Sri Lanka—find their way into the kitchens of America’s top chefs and the most discriminating home cooks. Such spices are exquisitely fresh, vibrantly aromatic and full of flavor that offers a true taste of the terroir in which they are grown. One whiff of those intoxicating black peppercorns and you understand how the lust for spices propelled men halfway around the world, to endure and inflict almost unimaginable horrors in their quest for shriveled berries, dried roots, hunks of bark and seeds.
There’s nothing wrong with targeting your core crowd. It makes good sense when you're building a business. But for “gourmets”--people who search for excellence and authenticity in the world of food—middlebrow is not good enough. And it shouldn’t be enough for Penzeys either. You can either talk down to your audience, or, like the song, you can take them higher by using a fine product to offer glimpses of the wider world.
A good place to start would be with those retail stores: I’d like to see a Penzeys with brilliant color, as bright and vivid as the open sacks of spices in a Moroccan market. It doesn’t take much: the orange walls at Christina’s in Cambridge would be a start. Next, instead of the unfinished display crates I saw at one Penzeys store, how about “a sniffing bar” like the one at Goumanyat et Son Royaume in Paris? It’s an altar of sorts, where you can inhale the fragrance of sultry golden mace, resinous green cardamon, and a dozen different peppercorns. (Goumanyat, incidentally, is an imagined prince who rules over a world of savory pleasure.) And please, don’t tell me that Aleppo pepper makes “an attractive sprinkle for potato, chicken and tuna salad and deviled eggs too.” Give me pictures and stories of real people who grow and harvest spices. Let them tell me about their world and how spices fit into their lives.
So what’s wrong with gourmets?