Dancing Elephant, Spoonful, and Ronance Mouthwatering Morsels, were the winners of a retail pitch day competition hosted Wednesday by Fairway Market in partnership with Naturally New York, which fosters sustainable and responsible business practices and supports entrepreneurship.
The event's judges sought to discover products from early-stage and diverse-owned businesses that are unique, and facilitate what judge and Village Super Market operator Perry Blatt, called the “treasure-hunting experience” that the store seeks to offer. The judges panel included Deliah Martinez, store manager at Fairway, as well as Fairway and Village Super Market buyers and directors.
Dancing Elephant is a woman-owned maker of ayurvedic Kitchari, a combination of lentils, grains, and spices. Spoonful is a Black-owned, Brooklyn-based breakfast brand specializing in overnight oats made with chia seeds, flaxseed meal, and more. Ronance Mouthwatering Morsels is a maker of chips made from king trumpet mushrooms.
Representatives of these brands joined ten other pre-selected food makers that pitched their products. Fairway initially set out to name a single grand prize winner but instead named three.
“We want to have products that make New Yorkers look here first, and try to have unique finds that make them proud to say, ‘I found it at Fairway,’” said Amanda Fischer, marketing communications manager at Village Super Market, owner of Fairway, before announcing the winners.
Many products selected to participate in the competition fit into food trends such as better-for-you, plant-based, and globally-inspired flavors.
Blatt told SFA News Daily that, with the event, “[Fairway] wanted to give products that haven’t gone mainstream, or who are not in a ton of retailers the chance to start here.”
The winners will receive prizes worth $10,000, including placement in four Fairway stores and up to 20 other Village Super Market stores depending on product fit, as well as off-shelf placements and ongoing marketing and distributor support.
Fairway indicated that it will reach out to other competing brands to continue conversations about shelf placement opportunities.
For many of the brands, including Ronance and Dancing Elephant, this was their first pitch competition. A Ronance co-founder mentioned that, although they were nervous, the closed-door format to a smaller audience made them feel at ease, and that the energy was celebratory and inviting.
Mateen Pouyafar of Seedly, a seed-based snack company, said that the competition was a wonderful way to “get my feet wet, especially in front of an iconic New York store.”
Blatt noted the positives of participating in a pitch competition as a retailer: “It’s a fun type of format where you’re getting to know the entrepreneur and the person that is coming up with these ideas, see where it came from, see where the creative spark and passion to want to bring these products to life came from. It tells you a lot about what these folks are going to do to get their brand to the next level.”
He spoke of the relationship between the brand and retailer as one of mutual effort, where both businesses help each other. This sentiment was echoed by Bradley Gifford of Spoonful, one of the competition's winners, who said he wants to invest in retailers that want to invest in brands.
“I don’t want to be in every Whole Foods or all over the country in the next year and a half. I want to max out sales at every Fairway,” he said.
This is the first partnership of this type between Naturally New York and Fairway.
“It seemed like a perfect partnership,” Gigi Lee Chang, managing partner of Naturally New York, told SFA News Daily. “One of our board members had a great relationship with some of the Fairway folks and reached out to start the conversation. It just built from there.”
Both Lee Chang and Blatt said that they would be happy to partner again for a competition like this. “This could easily be something we do every year,” Blatt said.
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Image: Naturally New York