Training Tips to Boost Profits

A CHEESE DEPARTMENT EMPLOYEE WHO HASN’T BEEN TRAINED TO HANDLE, CUT, WRAP OR SELL THE CHEESES UNDER HIS OR HER CARE CAN UNDERMINE a retail business by turning off shoppers and tarnishing the store’s image. Employees at the cheese counter should be more than warm bodies that fill customer orders. If they have the product knowledge and confidence to educate, entice, enthuse and cross-sell, retailers say they will stay longer and boost store profits.

Here are tips from top retailers on effective staff training:

1. Encourage tasting. Never set limits on what employees can taste. Urge them to try everything, especially when they cut into a new wheel. Only by comparing this month’s Munster to last month’s will they begin to draw distinctions. “It helps if they taste similar things, like Gruyère and Emmentaler, so they can see how they’re different,” says Susan Walrabenstein of Zupan’s Market in Portland, Ore. When a new cheese arrives, create a learning opportunity by comparing it to two or three other cheeses in the same category.

2. Institute a mentoring system. New hires should shadow a veteran employee for at least the first few days, learning the layout of the cheese case and the location of supplies, monitoring customer-staff interactions, and observing the proper ways to cut and wrap. Walrabenstein, who formerly ran her own cheese shop, liked to set up two workstations side by side so a newbie could follow along simultaneously on tasks like cutting wheels with a cheese wire. At Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor Mich., new arrivals spend one of their first shifts with the store’s cheese buyer to see how product is received and stored, says Manager Fabian Salinas. For their first few days on the retail floor, Salinas schedules them in off-peak shifts, when veterans will have time to show them the ropes.

3. Hold regular team meetings. Zingerman’s calls team meetings “huddles” and schedules them once a week, so staffers can taste together, discuss issues and share solutions. At Central Market, the eight-store Texas upscale specialty supermarket chain, employees from all departments have joint meetings where new products are introduced and sampled, says Helen Duran, the chain’s training coordinator. Keeping cheese department employees informed about products from other departments enables them to cross-sell, she adds.

4. Build a reference library. Nobody can be expected to remember everything they’re taught in the first weeks on a job. Invest in a collection of cheese reference books and encourage employees to take them home, suggests Sebastian Craig, cheesemonger at the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills. Also, keep a binder of relevant articles in the department. “I’m constantly keeping up with stuff from the Internet, going to cheese websites and printing out sheets,” says John Zancolli, cheese cave team leader for Di Bruno Bros. in Philadelphia.

Other materials to make accessible to staff: diagrams for how to cut cheeses properly; a cheese pronunciation guide; supplier literature and videos.

5. Provide opportunities for off-site learning. Organize a field trip to visit local cheesemakers, if possible, or send your staff to classes. Di Bruno Bros. encourages employees to spend a paid day in New York scouting other cheese shops, and has also paid for staffers to take classes at Manhattan’s Artisanal Premium Cheese. Juliana Uruburu, cheese director for Market Hall Foods in Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., gives her employees time off to visit the Winter Fancy Food Show® in San Francisco, armed with a map of the store’s vendors. Some merchants send key employees to the American Cheese Society’s annual conference or to work for a week at Neal’s Yard Dairy, the esteemed London retailer and British cheese exporter. Be sure that the employees who receive these perks are debriefed when they return—perhaps by making a presentation or writing a report—so that all staffers can benefit from what they learned. “I want employees to know I care about them and I’m going to continue their education so they can grow in their job,” says Uruburu.

6. Make expectations clear and monitor progress. At Zingerman’s, new employees receive a “passport” with a checklist of tasks they’re expected to master during their 60-day orientation. Managers monitor the passport to make sure the employee is achieving goals steadily, but it’s up to the new hire to seize opportunities to learn the material, such as how to open and break down a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Periodic written tests and role-playing exercises confirm that novices are making progress.

“We’ve really tried to prioritize what they need to know,” says Maggie Bayless, managing partner of ZingTrain, the consulting arm of Zingerman’s. “We get them up to speed so they’re making a contribution as quickly as possible. Once they’ve completed the passport, they’re a useful, productive member of the department.”

7. Develop a systematic training program. Such an important part of your operations should not be ad hoc, with new hires expected to take the initiative and figure things out. Yet many specialty food retailers are surprisingly laissez-faire about training, with no manuals or written procedures for newcomers. In contrast, Uruburu has developed a formal “cheese intensive” for novices, who spend several hours one-on-one with her in their first week on the job learning cheese basics and sales techniques. When they first work the counter, she trains them in knife skills and workplace ergonomics, such as how to lift heavy cheeses safely.

Worth the Time
Effective staff training in the cheese department takes considerable time and energy. “It’s worth it,” says Uruburu. “New employees are on the floor in full force within a week, up to speed, confident and charged.”

And what if you invest in training employees and then they leave? Russ Vernon, the now-retired specialty food pioneer at West Point Market in Akron, Ohio, always answered that question with another: But what if they stay?

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