2002 Best Merchandising Ideas: Specialty Food Whippers

Today's home chefs are more adventurous than ever. Specialty food whippers provide them with the opportunity to be even more creative and professional when entertaining. They also provide you with great merchandising potential in the form of classes, contests, and demonstrations.

Professional Invitation

Specialty food whippers comprise a great category for demonstrations to professional and home chefs. Holding demonstrations for both these groups will benefit your sales as you build product knowledge in your community.

Begin your merchandising efforts with local chefs. Provide specialty food whippers to two chefs from area restaurants and invite them to your store for a demonstration that promotes the whippers and their restaurants. Create a visually dynamic backdrop to the demonstration with rows of stainless steel food whippers. The polished and brushed stainless bodies create a great setting for a professional cooking area.

During the demonstration, the chefs should illustrate the food whippers' versatility by creating espumas, warm and cold sauces, and flavored crèmes. Espumas, the Spanish word for foams or mousses, follow the trend of light, innovative, modern cuisine. Foams can be side dishes, appetizers, desserts, or topping on cocktails. Provide customers with the chefs' recipes on cards, along with information on their local restaurants and food whippers.

Send out press releases about the applications of food whippers to local food writers. Be sure to include material about espumas, plus a photo of the product alongside a plated dish. Include the recipe for the dish created with the food whipper. Also, make note of chef appearances, inviting the writers to attend the demonstration and pick up their own specialty food whipper sample.

Get Saucy

Once you've introduced your community to the concept of food whippers with a splash, establish a "Whip It Up" Recipe Contest that encourages customers to experiment with their food whippers. Invite the two chefs and the attendant food writers to test and judge the recipes submitted for the contest.

The recipe contest should be divided into four areas: Espumas, sauces, flavored crèmes, and freestyle. Espuma recipes can fall into any category — appetizers, side dishes, desserts, or cocktails. Sauces may be anything from variations on Hollandaise sauce to a vodka crème sauce. Flavored crèmes can be used in a large variety of applications from crepe fillings to coffee toppings. The only requirement is that each recipe must include instructions for a complete application, such as a creamy curry sauce used to top Cumin Sautéed Shrimp.

The final category — freestyle — should encompass anything that doesn't quite fall into the other three. This allows your customers to really get inventive and think beyond the original recipes they received when they purchased the product.

Classroom Honor

The contest winner will be honored during a cooking class dedicated to concoctions made with a specialty food whipper. The winner will have the opportunity to explain the culinary creation they devised and demonstrate it for the class. Present a special cooking school gift certificate to the winner during the demonstration. Recognizing the winner during the class not only provides a great merchandising opportunity for specialty food whippers, but will also instill enthusiasm among your students, provide another focal point for new coverage, and promote your cooking school program.

You should also incorporate the specialty food whipper into your regular class schedule. Inform your instructors that the product is available for them to use in their classes. Cooking instructors will discover a variety of opportunities to use the product in their classes if you encourage them. Allow each instructor to either have or take home a specialty food whipper to test on his or her own creations. Offer a free whipper to the instructor who uses the tool first in their class or offer discounts to instructors who continually demonstrate whippers' versatility.

Classroom use also provides you with the opportunity to showcase the features of specialty food whippers, including the multifaceted decorator tips, dishwasher-safe capabilities, ability to handle warm and cold preparations, and ease of use. Also be sure to mention that the tool uses N2O chargers (the same used for cream whippers) and tell customers that you are a source for chargers. You should point out in class additional features that specialty food whippers offer, including the ability to yield five times the initial volume of ingredients, which makes them an economical product, as well as a trend-setting tool.

Snapshots

Specialty food whippers comprise a great category for demonstrations to professional and home chefs. Holding demonstrations for both these groups will benefit your sales as you build product knowledge in your community.

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Provide specialty food whippers to two chefs from area restaurants and invite them to your store to hold a demonstration that promotes the whippers and their restaurants.

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Establish a "Whip It Up" Recipe Contest that encourages customers to experiment with their food whippers.

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Allow the winner of your "Whip It Up" Recipe Contest to demonstrate their winning creation to a cooking school class.

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