Micheline Maynard - Satisfaction Guaranteed: How Zingermans Built a Corner Deli into a Global Food Community

Satisfaction Guaranteed

How Zingermans Built a Corner Deli into a Global Food Community

Micheline Maynard

Author of the Selling of The American Economy

City Tips: A Journalists Guide to the Worlds Great Cities

The Selling of the American Economy: How Foreign Companies Are Remaking the American Dream

The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market

The Global Manufacturing Vanguard: New Rules from the Industry Elite

Collision Course: Inside the Battle for General Motors

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Copyright 2022 by Micheline Maynard

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First Scribner hardcover edition February 2022

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Interior design by Alexis Minieri

Jacket design by Jaya Miceli

Jacket illustration by Joel Holland

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Maynard, Micheline, author.

Title: Satisfaction guaranteed : how Zingermans built a corner deli into a global food community / Micheline Maynard. Description: New York, NY : Scribner, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021043170 (print) | LCCN 2021043171 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982164614 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982164638 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Zingermans Community of Businesses. | Food industry and tradeMichiganAnn ArborHistory. | DelicatessensMichiganAnn ArborHistory.

Classification: LCC HD9009.Z56 M39 2022 (print) | LCC HD9009.Z56 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/764795dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043170

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043171

ISBN 978-1-9821-6461-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-6463-8 (ebook)

To everyone who taught me to cook

The past few years have been devastating for the specialty food business. In the boom times of the late-twentieth century and into the twenty-first, prestigious shops and luxurious chains were able to convince customers to willingly part with tens or hundreds of dollars for a few minutes of pleasure. This was a world that made chefs and shop owners into celebrities, a world that bustled with innovation and flavors and drew consumers who avidly followed food trends.

Much of that seems to have evaporated, along with more than 110,000 restaurants that closed as COVID-19 swept the country. While its tempting to blame the pandemic for their demise, the downward spiral began well before the pandemic spread across the United States.

Dean & Deluca, whose name was synonymous with expensive food, has disappeared. New Yorks beloved Fairway Markets filed for bankruptcy. Macys, whose housewares filled countless kitchens and whose classrooms hosted countless chefs, is a fraction of its former size. Williams Sonoma shops have closed. So have Sur La Table stores. Family-owned places in cities all over the country vanished as younger generations decided not to carry on their parents business. High rents drove some out of business; others simply couldnt find the employees they needed.

Layer COVID on top of that, and you have an industry thats plummeted from the pedestal it once enjoyed standing on into an existential crisis. But as many restaurants and food purveyors have dealt with their demise, one company has survived and thrived: Zingermans of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In 2022, Zingermans celebrates its fortieth anniversary, growing from a single crowded corner deli in a leafy college town to a $65 million business, with a vast following around the globe. More than two million people are on the mailing list for its catalogs, which overflow with quirky drawings, anecdotes about people who created the food, and mouthwatering descriptions. But Zingermans means different things to different people.

To many customers, Zingermans is food, such as the overstuffed sandwiches that first made the Deli famous, and the crusty bread, flavorful gelato, and hearty coffee that it produces in an industrial park on the south side of Ann Arbor. Its like the Jewish deli on the hill, says Alon Shaya, a James Beard Awardwinning chef with restaurants in New Orleans and Denver, known for his Israeli-inspired cuisine. Its the one we all kind of look up to. Zingermans contributed to the craze for balsamic vinegar, artisanal olive oil, and exotic spices from all over the world, long before they were widely available. Shoppers can buy them in person at the Deli or via Mail Order, which sent out its first hand-drawn catalog nearly thirty years ago.

About half the items in the catalog are made by Zingermans, but the other half are from specialty food companies that Zingermans has helped establish among food lovers, like Nueskes, the admired Wisconsin maker of cured meats, Bentons, famous for its Tennessee bacon, and American Spoon from northern Michigan, a source of fruit spreads and sauces. Says Ethn de Vienne, owner of pices de Cru in Montreal, whose spices fill two displays in the Deli, Nobody is as dynamic or like-minded to us as Zingermans.

Within the business world, however, Zingermans is known as a valuable resource of management ideas, which its cofounders, Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, have taught to leaders in and outside the food world. Celebrated chefs Rick Bayless of Chicago and Joanne Chang of Boston have turned to Zingermans for advice in both leadership and staff training. Through the years, Ti Martin, co-owner of Commanders Palace in New Orleans, has studied and relied upon Zingermans techniques for good service and transparent finances. I dont know which ones I stole from Ari and which I made up myself, she says of Weinzweig. Like Zingermans, she believes that growth is a good thing, but its why you want to grow that matters.

Millennial entrepreneur Kat Gordon of Muddys Bake Shop in Memphis regularly practices the lessons she learned from ZingTrain, the business that provides training to both Zingermans staff and outsiders who wish to learn the companys management techniques. In 2021, Gordon renovated her bakery to include a classroom where she conducts a class in Visioning, one of the companys basic concepts. In it, participants craft a picture of what theyd like their business or their personal lives to look like in the future. Im a better business owner, and a better manager and a better human, for having had anything to do with ZingTrain, Gordon says.

Zingermans has provided a stage for hundreds of food celebrities in the special dinners it holds at the Roadhouse, its flagship sit-down restaurant, and in the pastry classes at Bake!, which have featured cookbook writers Dorie Greenspan and Stella Parks. It takes part in countless community fund-raisers, some benefiting its own charity, Food Gatherers, which collects millions of pounds of unused food from restaurants and stores in Ann Arbor and redistributes it to people in need. For the past decade, save for a pandemic break, Zingermans drew attendees from around the world to Camp Bacon, its annual pork-centered symposium looking at history and evolving trends.