Tuesday, September 17

 
Moosewood to Sell Canned/Frozen Products

It seems a bit heretical to apply conventional marketing terms to what Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, N.Y., is planning to do, but there's no way around it: the restaurant will extend its brand, already on cookbooks, to canned and frozen organic vegetarian foods, and they're planning an extensive trade and consumer campaign to support the roll-out early next year. (Yikes! Get my pinstripe suit out of mothball!) This story, from MediaPost, a Web site and email newsletter tracking media and marketing news, reports Moosewood will market the products for specialty health-food stores, supermarkets and institutions. The move is destined to capitalize on supermarkets' increased willingness to allot shelf and floor space to organic foods and consumers' willingness to buy them at higher prices than they'd pay for conventional equivalents. Plus, the Moosewood brand is gold in organic/vegetarian circles, thanks to the restaurant's rep, which extends beyond the People's Republic of Ithaca (as someone who lives there once called it), and the cookbooks by food writer Mollie Katzen. (Highly recommended; the garbanzo-bean dip from "Sundays at Moosewood," the most conventional of the Moosewood book series, I think.)
posted by Unknown 1:36 PM