Marco DiVincenzo pushes through the swinging doors to the back of a Longo’s supermarket in northern Toronto, looking for something to go with his sausages. This time, the head of the store’s kitchen is thinking peppers.
The zucchini is still good, though. So are the red bell peppers. He grabs a dozen or so. “I just want the red ones,” he says, heading back to his open kitchen at the front of the store, where he excises the peppers’ blemishes like a dermatologist and roasts them with sausages in the pizza oven, to be served at lunch on the store’s hot table.
The chain of 35 stores now has three in-store restaurants and a new store selling prepared meals, meal kits and snacks to commuters in Toronto’s underground PATH system that runs under the business district. A forthcoming store in Toronto’s Liberty Village may also have a microbrewery onsite. The problem 10 years ago was that grocers were trying to be restaurateurs without the experience, says Robert Carter, an industry analyst at NPD.
Ilano, a trained architect from the Philippines who has worked at Longo’s for six years, starts running combinations in her head. Mary Dalimonte, a recently retired senior grocery executive with 10 years’ experience at Sobeys Inc. and another 30 at Loblaw Cos. Ltd., says customer demand drove the evolution of the hot table. If a store is doing its ordering correctly, she says, it shouldn’t be dealing with tonnes of waste.
He pauses, looking at a bin of spices on a shelf while wiggling his fingers in the air and singing a Shawn Mendes tune, “I love it when you … call … me … señorita.”“Yeah, I need celery,” he says. “It’s too much red.” “It reduces our shrink,” he says. “If you take ground beef and convert it to meatloaf, it retails at $21.90 a kilo as opposed to say, what’s ground meat? $6.99. So you do the math. It helps the bottom line. Something that was going to be food waste actually becomes gold.”“I’ve got a high-volume store,” Piligra says. “That’s a lot of sales for . It’s a lot.”As DiVincenzo brazes his veal, between singing and whistling, he’s thinking out loud: this dish would be nice with pasta.
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