[ BUSINESS ]
Their current library now contains over 2,000 recipes and the
test kitchen is constantly working to expand it and tweak the existing products. It’s all to give them a slight edge in the market
that is constantly undergoing big changes. “Five or 10 years ago,
everyone was on the carb craze, now we’re watching our sodium
and sugar intake,” she offered as an example. There are also subgroups of consumers that have drastically different needs from one
another. A 60-year-old retiree with grown children is going to want
different things in her hummus than a 40-year-old businesswoman
who subsists on baby carrots and Triscuits during the workday.
“We’re constantly trying to understand who the consumer is today,
tomorrow and in five years,” Niczowski says, and no detail – from
the amount of toppings on a spread to the release flap on the packaging – is too small to be overlooked.
And yet, despite this constant evolution, Niczowski and her
team have stayed true to their foundations. When Niczowski
founded the company with her mother in 1991, she says that
there were no other companies offering ready-made salads and
spreads in grocery stores. The only place you could find it was at
a high-end delicatessen or a family picnic and she didn’t see any
reason why it had to stay that way.
most significant presence in the business is her sister, who’s the VP
of Operations. She also happens to live a mere seven doors down
from Niczowski and their two families vacation together every year
(most recently in the Canary Islands, the Spanish Archipelago off
the coast of northwestern Africa).
“I know that in a lot of other family businesses, it’s the family who
really calls the shots,” she told the Globe and Mail in 2012, “but
we all have our own job descriptions here.” While her company
has tried to maintain the open-mindedness of a small family operation, the size and scale of the company now necessitate a kind
of corporate-mindedness, with all its hierarchies, carefully defined
roles and processes.
During the interview, Niczowski is quick to credit her family and
staff for the company’s growth over the years but is short on details.
She’s kind and patient and very generous, but like most people at the
helm of massive companies she’s also busy. When she did her interview with the Globe and Mail, she said there were certain stretches
in career where she would work 16-hour days, and today every minute of her schedule after our one-hour interview is booked. When
we emailed her follow-up questions, she responded promptly, explaining her involvement in the community in Vaughan (“we sup-
WHILE THE STAPLES LIKE MEAT AND
POTATOES STAY THE SAME, THE FOODS
THAT YOU USE TO ACCESSORIZE THE
DISH CHANGE WITH THE SEASON.”- Susan Niczowski
One of their recipes was one they “stole” from Niczowski’s aunt: a
potato-and-egg salad. They came up with others for a Greek feta
pasta salad, a pesto tortellini and a redskin potato salad. Then
came the spreads like baba ghanouj (still to this day made the
authentic way with grilled eggplant), hummus (which now comes
in dozens of varieties) and creamy cheese dips like their top-selling
asiago artichoke. Leveraging her background in microbiology and
chemistry, Niczowski was among the first in the industry to come
up with methods to ensure these spreads and salads would last the
trip from manufacturing facility, to grocery store, to home without
pumping them full of preservatives. At Summer Fresh, they stave
off spoilage with nothing more than natural sugars, salts, bacteria,
lemon and lime. And while this may matter to plenty of food –
and health-conscious consumers today, you would have had a hard
time finding a wide market that cared about these things 25 years
ago. Niczowski was ahead of her time and willing to eat the costs
of producing foods that were certified organic and kosher. Today,
the only real difference is that instead of mixing up a two-kilo batch of a given product, Summer Fresh may be mixing
2,000 kilos worth.
Summer Fresh now employs over 100 people but her family members still play a central role. Her mother, now in her eighties, is still
a hands-on presence whenever they’re trialing new recipes. Her father, a retired engineer, not only helped design the equipment but
also the workflow in the manufacturing facility. But perhaps the
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port children, the elderly and women’s causes…there are way too
many [organizations] to list”), what it was like working with her
family (“It’s great to work with people that you love and respect”),
and about the company’s tough times (or rather, lack thereof; “we
do not keep all our eggs in one basket—thank God.”)
And that was that. You almost got the sense she would have been
happier to let the product speak for itself and one could cite the two
grocery bags full of dips and pasta salad as evidence of this.
Later in the week, I tried the Greek pasta salad, which was a very
healthy portion of small and thin penne noodles folded into a
tangy dressing with chunks of feta and peppers. A few nights later I
polished off nearly the entire container of the asiago artichoke dip.
Both were very good and it was easy to see h ow Niczowski had
built an international brand around them. But there wasn’t – as I
had hoped – some revelation in either of those products. It’s easy to
catch yourself thinking that the success of a food company might
be distilled down to a few bites, but it’s never that simple. Niczowski understands this.
As I was leaving the interview I remarked how she had what
seemed like a long day ahead of her. She shrugged it off. “I don’t
think about the time, I get up in the morning and I love what I
do.” That’s not exactly a recipe to success, but certainly a very
important ingredient.