Zingerman's

From Reveries dot com...

The food industry wisdom is that people can't taste the difference, don't care, and won't pay more. We don't think that's true, says Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of Zingerman's Deli.

"We believe," says Ari, "that people can taste the difference, that if they can afford it, they happily will pay more if they know why they're paying more and can taste it."

Though it claims but one location, housed in an old-and-quirky, two-story, 1902 orange-brick building, on the corner of Detroit and Kingsley in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Zingerman's has been called the most famous deli in America.

In part that's because its founders - Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw - have stuck to a vision of serving highest quality, traditional foods and doing all they can to make sure that no customer ever turns into a former customer.

It is also because the two men resolutely refuse to franchise their business from coast to coast. They believe that leaving Ann Arbor would forfeit what makes Zingerman's great.

So, instead, in 1994, Ari and Paul wrote a 15-year business plan that keeps Zingerman's local, in Ann Arbor, and "line-extends" into a range of ancillary businesses - each of which supports the flagship, the deli. So far, in addition to the deli, there are six such businesses (bakery, mail-order, training, catering, creamery, restaurant).

Oh, and Ari has also just published a book, Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating, a breezy and fun read that's loaded with fascinating details and laced with quick-and-easy recipes.

The grand plan, though, is to launch a total of 12-15 Zingerman's businesses by the year 2009. That highly unusual, and impressive, business model has earned Zingerman's lots of attention in the business press. Still, underneath it all is the same, basic idea that got Ari and Paul started in the first place.


"Everything we do starts with substance, because it's all about the food," says Ari. "We don't sit there and think - there's a hole in this market, what do we do? We look for the food that we believe in, to either make or buy, and then we figure out how to get people interested in buying it, which has to be based on how it tastes."

He continues: "It's not a value judgment about what people should eat. It's up to each person to decide. I could tell you what I like and why, but at the end of the day, it's up to the customer to make the decision."

It's a point of view at which Ari arrived while working as a dishwasher at an Ann Arbor restaurant, a job he took after graduating from the University of Michigan, where he had studied Russian history. Paul was the general manager at this restaurant, and the two became friends.

Paul eventually left to open his own fish market, and, after a while, it reached a point where Ari's philosophy of food and business was taking on a life of its own, and so he, too, left the restaurant. He says he really had no idea exactly what he was going to do next.

Incredibly, it all clicked, and very quickly. Paul rang up Ari and told him about some retail space that was coming open, near his fish market. The thought was that maybe they would do something together.

And they did.


What were you thinking when you and Paul started Zingerman's back in 1982?

We wanted to bring great-tasting, traditional foods, especially a lot of the traditional Jewish foods that we had grown up with, into the neighborhood here. I grew up in Chicago and Paul grew up in Detroit, and a lot of those foods weren't available here, in Ann Arbor.


It's food that is very down to earth. It's the kind of food you can eat every day. It's accessible to everybody. What we don't want is the kind of food that you only go out for once a year. We like food that you can eat and enjoy all the time.

How does the deli compare today to the way it was when you first opened it?

Well, it's bigger, but it's still relatively small. Ultimately, we're still trying to do the same thing we started with. We want to have world-class food in a casual setting.

We want to have a great place for people to work. We want a unique experience for people - one that is true to who we are and what the business is. We want to be true to the community, and not a replica of some other place, somewhere else.

We want to have great service and make being at Zingerman's a really fun and enjoyable experience for everybody involved. Ultimately, it's really not any different now than it was before.

What is it like inside Zingerman's Deli?

It's probably overwhelming and extremely confusing the first time you come in. Our job is to try to help manage that confusion and turn it into a positive experience. It's not really like what most people are used to. Most people who've heard a lot about it are surprised that it's smaller than they expected it to be.

Frequently, the line is out the door. There might be a greeter at the door, giving out menus and samples and helping to direct traffic. We have an interesting mix of people who have been here three times a week for 15 years and people who've never been here before.

When you first walk in, you're looking at a whole wall of bread from our Bakehouse … a whole counter with breads and pastries on it. If you look to the left, there's smoked fish. There's a whole cheese counter. If you walk straight ahead, about 20 yards, you'll find a counter where people are taking orders for sandwiches and prepared foods.

If you walk to the right of the bread area, you wander into a relatively small space that's got all sorts of olive oils and vinegars and honeys and mustards and pastas and other interesting, un-refrigerated foods. All of them are open for tasting, for samples.

What is your merchandising philosophy?

We do a lot of talking. The dry goods you could simply pick up and walk out with, but all the cheese is cut to order, as are the cured meats and smoked fish. We have a lot of signage. We do our own posters and graphic design in our own particular style, which evolved over time.

We teach courses on our approach to design. We have a lot of it documented in terms of the look and feel of it, and how we use it. It's pretty interactive and lively. It's bold. It should be fun. It's pretty colorful, and very personalized.

Do you advertise?

We do very little advertising. We do one ad a month in the Ann Arbor Observer, which is a community guide. That’s probably 80 percent of our advertising for the whole organization. We're very much oriented towards guerilla marketing.


What kind of guerilla marketing?

We create a lot of written materials that we give out in-house, in the belief that the more we share information and education with our existing customers the more they'll be up for buying good food and learning about what we do.

We create a lot of hand-made, colorful, illustrated posters that share information about the food. We work with the press to share stories of what we're doing to keep them up to speed.

It's a lot of simple stuff - handouts, stuffed bags, talking to customers, T-shirts, emails. It's just realizing that it takes years and years to build up a market for a product. You can't just put out one little promotional piece or one ad and expect that it's going to make much headway.

We don't have big budgets, so we just keep working with inexpensive tools, word of mouth. We try to make substantial things happen so that people are interested in them.

In your employee manual it says that one out of every 300,000 customers can't be satisfied no matter what. How do you satisfy that customer?

In most businesses, the average service provider would tell you that it's one out of every two or three customers who can't be satisfied. We need people to understand that, as we see it, a customer who can't be satisfied is a totally rare exception. It is not the norm.

You just keep working with them. I'm having lunch with a guy next week who wrote two long emails about all the things that were wrong with Zingerman's. But you just keep inviting them back in until you figure it out.

Have you noticed any significant ways in which your customers' tastes have changed?

Oh, sure. Fifteen years ago it was a big deal just to have an extra virgin olive oil - now it's in every grocery store. But that's the nature of the marketplace, so we always have to be improving in order to get to where we want to be.

You wrote a whole article about cream cheese, explaining how and why Zingerman's cream cheese is not like the brands most of us buy at the supermarket.

We just go back to the old way of doing it, before it got all industrialized. It's basically just a very old, simple process. You take the milk, you add the rennet, which is what sets it and creates the curd. You cut the curd, which releases the whey - like Little Miss Muffett. Then you literally hand ladle the curd into cloth bags so that it can drain. After it's drained, you add a little salt and cream, and you're done.

It has texture, it has flavor. It doesn't have any vegetable gum. It's not extruded, which means it's not forced through dies to move it more quickly through the process. The milk is pasteurized at a much lower temperature, which takes longer, but protects the flavor.


Do foods like Zingerman's cream cheese have mass market potential?

Not at the level that we do it, but I'm confident that in three to five years there will be some version of it from some major marketer, just like they copy everything else. It won't be as good, but it'll have a picture of a nice farm on the front of the package.

A slice of Zingerman's bread can cost as much as fifty cents. Why does it cost so much?

Just like with the cream cheese or anything else - it's just a lot of work. You have a lot more steps involved. It's relatively inexpensive to make food if nobody touches it, and if you use really good ingredients they cost more. If you take longer to produce it, it costs more.

How do you make sure it's profitable when it costs so much to make?

Um, you do the math? (laughs)

But you also have to make sure there's sufficient demand to pay the freight.

You do, but you don't know if there's demand until you go out and try to do it. In theory, big companies try to do all of that research first. We're not that big, so we just sort of start with what we believe in and then figure out how to get people to buy it. Even if you do the research, you don't really know whether it will sell, either. You just think you know. But people are wrong all the time.

Does making food so much healthier and attractive help or hurt America's obesity problem?


It helps - totally - because when you eat really good food, you eat less of it. You enjoy it and it's satiating. If you look at our customers and employees, we don't really have a lot of overweight people. If you're a healthy person and you're enjoying life and food, generally you are in pretty good shape.

When you eat a lot of processed foods, you find that they have an unappealing finish to the flavor, and you tend to eat more and more of it to get rid of that finish. Whereas, if you eat a square of really great chocolate, maybe you have two squares, but it's pretty unusual that anybody eats an entire bar of a really great chocolate. Some people do, but it's not like the way most people will put a Hershey bar down in 48 seconds.

When people eat good food, they eat in balance. When we have new employees start, they try to eat everything in the first week. Then they realize the food's not going anywhere and you'll see that everybody who has worked for us for a long time eats a little of this and a little of that. It's actually a much nicer way to eat.

Don't suppose you're a fan of the Atkins Diet.

No, but I'm a fan of everything in moderation. Up until 18 months ago it was all about low fat. We kind of ignored that, too. That's the thing about traditional foods - people have been eating these foods for hundreds and thousands of years. It's not going anywhere because of a new trend. We try to stick with what we believe in, and not flow with the trends.

What about Mad Cow disease?

It's the same thing. We buy only from sources like Niman Ranch, and for 22 years they've been in business they've never allowed animal byproducts into the feed. So, they're doing all the things you should to avoid those problems. We pay a lot more to get their meat, in part because it tastes a lot better, but also because we can feel confident selling it to our customers.


You have a new book out, Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating.

Yes. It has about 15 chapters, each one on a different ingredient and there are about 100 recipes in it, too. Each chapter goes through how the food is made and how to use it and what makes the difference between a good one and a not so good one. It includes stories about the people who make it.

The recipes I tried to focus on are things that people could make after a long day at work - not just things that you look at in a nice cookbook but never produce but once a year. Consequently, those are recipes that require really good ingredients to work because they're simple.

If you had to pick one meal that's your favorite, what would that be?

Probably pasta. I cook every night. Something simple. Good olive oil. Parmesan cheese. If it was in the middle of winter and I was in a hurry and I was at home I might toss some sardines with it, capers maybe.

You like it salty?

No, good sardines aren't salty. Capers shouldn't be salty either. Bad ones are. Most people have experienced not great food. Anchovies are a perfect example.

The anchovies that most people have been served - me included, growing up - aren't very good. But basing your opinion on those anchovies is like eating sliced American singles and deciding you don't like Cheddar cheese.

I'm a city kid. It took me a long time to get used to going out into nature. It's not good or bad; it's just different. It's all what you're used to. Just because I'm uncomfortable in the woods doesn't mean the woods are bad.

Has any one of the seven Zingerman's businesses proved to be the most challenging to make work?

They're all challenging. There are no easy ones. You just have different problems with each one. It's always hard - no matter how much people think you're raking in the money. I don't mean that we're not profitable, but even if you're profitable, you're always reinvesting it in the business. It's never a piece of cake - no pun intended from the Bakehouse perspective.

How do you ensure the same quality in the mail order business?

I would never tell you that it's the same to eat a piece of bread that we ship as it would be have a piece that came directly from the Bakehouse that day. The reality is that most people don't have access to great bread or baked goods so it's not a choice of should I walk down the block to my really wonderful Artisan bakery or should I order it by mail?

Are there any circumstances under which you would replicate some of these businesses - the Roadhouse for example?

No. It's in our vision. It's all documented. In 2006, we're going to start revisiting our vision, which runs through 2009, but I can't tell you what we'll come up with. No, no circumstances. The only circumstance would be that if it became strategically unachievable, or wasn't inspiring. But it is inspiring, and I think it's strategically achievable.

So, no - the practical answer is no, we're not changing our vision. We have a documented vision that says this is what we're doing, and we teach it to everybody who works here. You can't just go back on it. Well, you could, but it wouldn't be a very smart move.

This isn't a short-term decision. We sat down ten years ago and we wrote a 15-year vision and that's what we will do.

By the way, who is Zingerman?

We made it up. There are people, we've since learned, who have that name. But we made it up. We were going to call it Greenberg's, and name it after a woman who was a regular customer at the fish market.

But a week or ten days before we were going to open we got a call from somebody who had already registered the name and wouldn't let us use it. So I went to Paul's house, we drank a few beers and sat on the floor of his living room and brainstormed until we came up with something we liked.

It worked out for the best.