Friday, August 8, 2008

Dallas start-up bakes unique stuffed breads

By Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

GET STUFFED: Aceto’s stuffed breads — frozen, above, and cooked, opposite page — are newly available at Whole Foods stores in four states, and four of her specialty products will be featured in the Neiman’s Christmas catalog.

Philomena Aceto loves to watch people eat — and if they’re eating her food, all the better.

A former correspondent for Dallas Voice’s DVtv, Aceto has spent years in the food industry — as a caterer, cooking instructor, even restaurant owner. But now she’s positioned for something altogether new to her: having people enjoy her cooking when she’s nowhere near them.

A few years ago, she “got to a place where I was teaching and enjoying it, but catering didn’t give me fulfillment. I talked to Dawn” — her partner, Merge Media founder Dawn Meifert — “and she said, ‘You have all these recipes — maybe you should market a product.’”

Aceto’s family hails from Italy, so to her, surviving the Atkins Diet trend was merely a matter of “waiting for people to get over their carb weirdness.” She knew Italian food would make a comeback, and she was reminded of the stuffed breads her grandmother used to make when she was a child.

She began slowly (“three or four months of a funny nightmare” she calls it now), baking each batch fresh and schlepping it to the Farmer’s Market every weekend to sell with her assistant Katie. She even managed to land a product in last year’s Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog.

Then she was introduced to her current baker, David, who found an effective way to pre-make the breads and freeze the dough for cooking later. (“Why not let the customer take it back and bake it and smell it?” she reasoned.) So reliably brilliant is David’s intuition, she calls him the Bread Whisperer.

That small transition — from fresh-baked to home-baked — opened a new world to Philomena Food Co.

“We did lots of market research to see what our competition was and we didn’t see anything comparable,” she says.

Apparently, Whole Foods felt the same way. The organic market chain is the exclusive seller in the Southwest of her entire line of breads — six flavors, paired in three different two-loaf mini-packs: artichoke-tomato and broccoli-tapanade (Aceto’s grandmother’s original recipe, and the inspiration for the company); spinach-kalamata and fig-prosciutto; and garlic-pesto-roasted vegetable and pepperoni-tomato. The lattermost was “designed at the request of Whole Foods to appeal to kids, but everyone likes it,” Aceto says.

The breads are now available in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma, but “if we prove ourselves — we have a year — then they will take us national,” she says. “I think we will prove ourselves, but it’ll take time.”

But Aceto isn’t resting on that assumption. This week, her company started production for the upcoming Neiman’s catalog, where she’ll launch four new products (a phyllo-wrapped casserole and goat-cheese terrine among them), and in January, “our torta will be featured as their chocolate of the month,” she says. She also sells a line of savory biscotti to wineries in Napa Valley, and hopes to get them into Texas wineries soon.

Still, Aceto struggles with all the challenges faced by a small business owner. When a bag of flour soared to more than $35, she had to find a suitable replacement that would also comport with Whole Foods’ demanding standards that there be no preservatives, stabilizers and the like. (“The pepperoni is nitrate free, we even use purified water in our bread dough,” she says.) And launching a product requires tremendous effort — perhaps more than she anticipated.

“I’m on the road all the time,” she says, doing demos at Whole Foods across North Texas and in Austin — the “mothership of Whole Foods, which is awesome.”

But when Whole Foods’ largest-ever store opens across from NorthPark Center, she’ll be carried there too, making her products — all local, family-owned and hand-made — available in one of Dallas’ ritziest neighborhoods. And that will validate all the guerrilla marketing efforts and hard work.

“I hope I become the gay Mrs. Baird, but I’d even settle for being Aunt Jemima,” Aceto jokes. “I can pull off wearing a head scarf.”

Philomena Food Co. Signature Stuffed Breads available at Whole Foods Market across the Metroplex.

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