Toronto’s famed Cheese Boutique, a specialty food store known for its cheese vault and a wide assortment of gourmet products, is expanding its offerings into Organic Garage through that retailer’s Hand Picked Partner program.
Cheese Boutique becomes the third local food company to join the Organic Garage initiative, through which local specialty food companies set up kiosks inside the stores of Oakville, Ontario-based Organic Garage, which operates four locations in the Toronto area.
Organic Garage offers a natural venue for Cheese Boutique to expand, the cheese specialist said.
"It’s a fun place to shop and fits with the curated and exciting environment we’ve created for customers at our own store,” said Afrim Pristine, maître fromager at Cheese Boutique. “I am excited to share the joy that cheese brings me and showcase some of the world’s most amazing cheeses to the customers of Organic Garage.”
Cheese Boutique’s cheese vault includes an expansive variety of cheeses in various states of the aging process, including several exclusive varieties and a wheel of Parmigiano that has been aging since 2002. It also offers a wide range of other specialty foods, including truffles (in season), foie gras, dry-aged beef, olive oils from 80 different terroirs, jams, house-made pastries, and other fare.
All products and ingredients offered in the Hand Picked Partner kiosks will be vetted by Organic Garage, which focuses on natural and organic ingredients, said Matt Lurie, president and CEO.
Cheese Boutique’s kiosk “ensures a unique shopping experience for our customers and further differentiates Organic Garage from our competition,” he told SFA News Daily.
In April, Organic Garage announced two other Hand Picked Partners: the Cali-Rolls sustainable sushi brand, located inside one Organic Garage store, and Tori’s Bakeshop, a local organic and vegan bakery, which now offers a kiosk three days per week in all four Organic Garage locations.
Kiosks range from about 8-10 square feet up to about 60 square feet, Lurie said. He declined to disclose the specific financial terms of the Hand Picked Partner arrangements, although he said the partners pay Organic Garage either a fixed rent plus a percentage of sale, or else simply a percentage of sales.
“We have multiple ways of reviewing what a vendor needs to pay,” he said.
Cali-Rolls makes its own product fresh every day, and the other partners will either stock their kiosks themselves or deliver the product for Organic Garage employees to stock based on a set planogram.
“Either way the vendor controls and owns their own inventory and does their own orders by working either off historical sales, which we provide them weekly, or off inventory counts that we take and send to them,” Lurie said.
The company first announced its plans for the Hand Picked Partner program in 2017, saying at the time it could be both a way to showcase local specialty products and make its stores more productive. Organic Garage is currently in talks with five other potential partners for the program, Lurie said.
Organic Garage’s expansion of the Hand Picked program follows its recent acquisition of plant-based cheese innovator Future of Cheese, which seeks to make cheese alternatives using unique aging processes and plant-based ingredients. Future of Cheese recently inked an agreement for Ontario-based Flamaglo Foods Ltd., which manufactures a variety of plant-based foods, to produce products for Future of Cheese.
Organic Garage has a fifth store slated to open later this year in Toronto.
Related: Organic Garage Acquires The Future of Cheese; 5 Trends From the 2021 sofi Awards.
Image: Organic Garage
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