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Rouses Means Local innovation

pure water pour out. The cereal box is always full, the bag of sugar is always one pound or two, the pickles are perfect spears, sliced and arranged as though by a master of Tetris. It just somehow has to be robots. Right? Not always, and especially not when the product is local. Many — if not most — of your favorite products are prepared, tested, packed and labeled by human hands. Local products start small and scale upward. Local cooks and entrepreneurs don’t just start out like Kraft, with miles of robots mixing, shaking, pouring and stamping. Most are like Hanley’s Foods, whose Sensation salad dressing is prepared with local ingredients and bottled in Baton Rouge. Each of those labels is applied by a Louisianian — carefully and purposefully, like a painter’s stroke of the brush. And that gets to the heart of what it means to be local. It is never done by a single person, though it may be one person’s passion that keeps the project on a path to success. And Rouses Markets makes it a point to help get these companies up and running. “We used to have, on Wednesdays, what we would call Vendor Day,” says Tim Acosta, advertising & marketing director at Rouses. “We still do. We set up dedicated meetings for sales- people to come in just to present their ideas, and we work together to get their products out there. That all started with Donald in the mid-1980s.” Local products are community products. Their manufacture pays local workers whose kids attend local schools and who dine at local restaurants, tip local servers, shop at local stores. A rising tide lifts all boats; to support the little guy is to support everyone around you — it is what it takes to make one’s community thrive. Items made right here along the Gulf Coast are of such quality both inside and outside of the package that, if not for store displays spotlighting these local successes, you might never know they were local. Which is where Rouses comes in. “Local has first priority when it comes to our store, and every Rouses Market, I guarantee you, when you walk in, there’s a local product right there,” says Blake Richard, a Rouses manager. “At the store level, when we have a local item we always make sure we have a special ‘Buy Local’ sign that signals that item is local, and especially if the item is new, we’ll make a big display about it. Consumers want that local product. Donald once told me that we were local before local was cool, and it’s true, and that trend has exploded. We’re excited to be a driver of it.”

Local products are also featured in every ad that Rouses puts out. “I appreciate every Monday that I can come to work, log into our pricing system, and I can check weekly sales,” says Chris. “Watching those numbers grow for local companies, through the ideas that we collaborate on together — it’s rewarding for us and it’s rewarding for them.” It’s more personal than numbers, though. “It excites me when I see, for example, Mike Lewis’ Big Mike’s BBQ Smokehouse come into my store after we put his product on the shelf,” adds Chris. “You know he was excited to see his product! And that’s the thing: When you’re a local company carrying local products, your neighbor can see his or her product right there. It’s always exciting for the community.” According to Donald, a good local product needs a plan, but not necessarily all of the answers on the first day. Rouses can help fill in those blanks. “We help them clear from the beginning,” he says. “The packaging, how to get a UPC code, how to go to market, how to get into our stores…. We’ve done it for so many companies, I can’t even begin to name them all, the ones that we’ve started from boutique operations and taught them to grow. They come to us and say, ‘I have this product — now what do I do?’ and we teach them from there.”

We’ve teamed up with Home Malone , which supports over 150 Southern makers and artists who are designing and producing their products in the Deep South, to make exclusive merchandise, including a Makin’ Groceries door hanger and shirt celebrating our 60 th anniversary.

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