EXCLUSIVE: OLD PRODUCT GRABS NEW ATTENTION

July 29, 2005

Out-of-the-box thinking puts sausage in a box. Nicole Zaro Stahl reports from the AAMP convention in Buffalo, New York.

With a last name like Perfect, you’d think that branding your products with the family moniker would confer a significant marketing edge.

To be sure, second-generation meat processor Bill Perfect, proprietor of Perfect’s Meat Market/FreezLock Food Service in Johnstown, Ohio, finds the name an enviable asset, but being located just outside of Columbus, one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., he has some pretty sophisticated customers to satisfy.

Mr. Perfect decided to tweak old family recipes for summer and venison sausage and turn them into shelf-stable products.

One of the challenges: traditional vacuum packaging is far from eye-catching, and when you have only three seconds or so to grab a consumer’s attention, you need some extra oomph to get your product noticed. A little creative thinking led Mr Perfect to the solution, a new packaging format. With a local graphic designer, he developed a brightly colored rectangular box, much like the classic Velveeta™ cheese carton, in which to put the vacuum-packed sausage chubs. He admits it took a lot of trial and error to finalize the design and get costs under control, but now he’s got a distinctive contender in the gourmet food arena, a market he calls “wide open.”

Next on his agenda: a pocket-sized flip-top box for his jerky products. He figures a two-ounce package can fetch $4 at retail.

The original article can be found at http://www.meatnews.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Article&artNum=9969

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