From The Winter 2004 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

Gourmet Goes Organic

Today’s definition of gourmet means fresh and flavorful—in a word, organic

Writer Fran McManus, co-author of the Cooking Fresh series, fills her books with recipes created by many of America’s most revered, and indisputably gourmet chefs. To find her sources, you might expect McManus to start by going to the best restaurants. Instead, she visits a region’s best organic and sustainable farms and ranches. Inevitably, when McManus asks these growers which chefs are buying ingredients from the farms, she’s led to the region’s culinary stars.

What’s the connection? Today’s gourmet wants the freshest, most flavorful and most environmentally appropriate foods. These vital characteristics often add up to organic foods. Also, gourmet customers are growing more interested in foods with an added emphasis on local and seasonal, and artisan foods with a story to tell.

The new gourmet
To our parents’ generation, “gourmet foods” conjured up temperamental French chefs creating incredibly rich, complicated, heavily sauced dishes served in very formal surroundings. Inaccessible to most people, gourmet foods involved mysterious imported ingredients, acquired tastes and advanced skills in both language and cooking. To be a gourmet suggested more than a hint of snobbery, with most people wondering if their palates were discriminating and sophisticated enough to pass muster.

Organic foods, on the other hand, were “health foods.” They were good for you and good for the earth, but not necessarily awe-inspiring, and nothing you’d expect to find at a four-star restaurant. They had nutrition, but no style.

Today’s finest chefs and farmers—and the millions of Americans who have made cooking and food their favorite leisure-time investment and activity—have brought these parallel tracks together, and the intersection has revolutionized the culinary arts. Organic and gourmet (or specialty) foods share many consumers, and their markets overlap significantly. When high-quality, fresh ingredients are as much a part of cutting-edge cooking as skill in preparing them, the organic label is a key signpost for many professional and home chefs.

From a retailer’s perspective, this is a cultural shift worth watching. As food trends migrate from the most exclusive restaurants to the mainstream marketplace, retailers can predict what kinds of products will be most wanted.

The good news is that specialty organic foods are becoming widely available to meet the demand. From fresh produce to chocolate, wine, cheeses, olive oils, vinegars and meats, organic producers are delivering excellence.

Understanding what gourmet means today, and the busy intersection between gourmet/specialty and organic foods, can help attract and retain those most desirable customers: food lovers willing to spend more for the best.

From chefs to food educators
If Paris was the heart of old-school gourmet cooking, California’s Bay area is the locus of the new regime. Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant, is often cited as the godmother of the new gourmet model, in which organic foods and sustainable agriculture are paramount. Waters’ focus on freshness, seasonality, flavor and good farming practices is gospel for chefs today. Critics consider Chez Panisse one of the best, if not the best, restaurant in America.

Betsy Johnson, executive director of Chefs Collaborative, a Boston-based national network of more than 1,000 members of the food community who “promote sustainable cuisine by celebrating the joys of local, seasonal and artisanal cooking,” acknowledges Waters’ innovations along with those of Chicago’s Rick Bayless, California’s Deborah Madison, Odessa Piper of Wisconsin, Nora Pouillon of Washington, D.C., and others who have helped redefine gourmet cooking.

As restaurant chefs cook, so, eventually, do home chefs and “foodies” who want to reproduce their favorite dining-out flavors. Chefs like those in Chefs Collaborative also see themselves as food educators, helping to spread the word about practices like organic farming, as well as introducing new flavors.

The filtering down of food trends from chefs to consumers is nothing new. But good restaurants are everywhere now, and the trend now extends far beyond New York City and the Bay Area. “Here in Colorado Springs, Colo., dining used to be fast lane with a clown on a pole,” says Jim Sebastiani, owner of two Par Avion specialty foods stores. “Now there are good restaurants everywhere. And it’s more and more toward, ‘Let’s do this at home.’ Cooking is fun and creative, and [consumers] are looking for good ingredients.”

Sebastiani’s produce department is as much as 70 percent organic, and he offers organic selections in his extensive cheese and olive oil departments as well. He’s switched to hormone- and antibiotic-free meat. He cautions retailers, however, to remember, “There’s still major confusion between what’s ‘natural’ and what’s ‘organic.’”

Gourmet’s future
“The trend is definitely going in the direction of more fresh foods rather than the old idea of gourmet,” Sebastiani says. Author McManus agrees; she once worked at a gourmet foods store in Princeton, N.J., and saw organic items appear and gradually increase there. “When the quality of the organic produce got to the point that it was appealing to a larger market, and chefs discovered the flavor of it, then things really took off,” she says. And just as specialty foods stores now include organic, natural foods stores that began with an environmental ethic now feature more and more specialty foods in the mix.

With organic foods firmly established in the pantheon of gourmet stars, McManus believes the next phase will center on foods that really tell a unique story of their source, how they are produced and by whom. “I think there will always be more interest in the artisan food product, whether that be local or imported,” she says. “I think there’s a desire to connect with a person on the other end of a product. Everything is getting back to ‘Who is the person who put their hand on this product?’”

For retailers, this can mean going back to one of the most rewarding dimensions of food purveyance—sourcing the best foods, and providing new, exciting flavors to food-loving customers. More and more frequently, these are likely to be organic choices.

Elaine Lipson is the author of The Organic Foods Sourcebook (McGraw-Hill Contemporary, 2001).