Member Work/Life: Bondi Produce

Ezio Bondi and Matt DuPerrouzel are making salad kits cool. The childhood best friends first cut their teeth at Bondi — Ezio’s family-run produce business that supplies high-end Toronto restaurants — before launching a roaster kits business during the pandemic. After it flopped, they relaunched as arte*, a line of almost-ready-to-eat salad kits. With no experience in consumer brands, the pair got by with a little help from their friends: namely, Sarah Dobson at Design of Brand, who named arte* and designed its brand identity that helped their course correction pay off. arte* is now stocked at major grocery stores, and the founders are eyeing a US expansion. Here, they reflect on that first "colossal failure", the brand value of an influencer dinner and what they wish people understood when shopping in the produce section. 

What’s the story behind arte*?

⎯⎯⎯ Ezio Bondi: At Bondi, Matt and I were already doing all this fresh-cut fruit and vegetables for meal kit companies and large retailers. And we said, why don't we build a brand and try to fill a gap in the marketplace? At the time, Matt and I both had newborns, and making dinner was a challenge. So we came up with this concept of roaster kits under the arte* label, something for someone who likes to cook but maybe doesn't want to subscribe to Chefs Plate or HelloFresh, or has meal kit fatigue. Can we make something that they could go to the grocery store, buy it, buy some protein – buy a tub of lettuce and make dinner in 20 minutes?

And that was the first iteration of arte*. These roaster kits, which were a colossal failure, lasted three months on shelves. We went back to the drawing board, and Matt had a genius idea: "Why don't we just do salad kits?" We’re really good at cutting vegetables and putting them in a bag. We have all the equipment. Let's do salad kits.

And we saw a gap in the market. A lot of products out there today are dominated by two or three multinational conglomerates, like Dole and Taylor Farms. We thought we could take what we've learned from working with restaurants and chefs throughout our careers and offer a restaurant-quality salad kit with local ingredients. 

What did you learn from the first failure? How did it feel to fuck up?

⎯⎯⎯ Ezio: Matt, why don’t you take that one, bud.

Matt DuPerrouzel: It was a rude awakening. We were overconfident and we lacked a full understanding of what it would really take to have a successful brand in the marketplace. We were naive. We kind of went in eyes wide shut, if that makes sense, and ran into a brick wall. We got a very hard-knocks education in what retail really is.

We had already invested several hundred thousand dollars into this new foray. So it really showed us that we had to go back to the drawing board and do our homework. The "move fast and break things" mentality that we had used in distribution and manufacturing for the last ten years wasn't going to work in CPG (consumer packaged goods). We had to be a lot more methodical — figuring out how to position the brand, identifying our target customer, deciding how to market it, determining which flavours to develop, what retailers we wanted to work with, where we wanted to be positioned in stores, what shelf placement looks like, what ad cycles look like, and what merchandising support looks like. Without those failures and quick learnings, arte*’s salad line wouldn't be what it is today. Because if retailers aren’t selling through your product, you’re going to be delisted and de-shelved — and then you don’t have a brand at all. You have to ensure that both parties are successful and take the lead in making that happen. 

What was that learning curve like from B2B to consumer? You obviously need a great product, but you have to understand brand, design…

⎯⎯⎯ Ezio: We kind of went into it with no real strategy and really thought it was going to be more like B2B sales. I mean, in B2B, if a restaurant is ordering produce from you, that's it, you've done 80% of the work. And sure, it's great if you have an Instagram and a newsletter and all these little bells and whistles, but you're not really doing a lot of brand-building. You're just delivering on the promise, and that’s it.

The big learning curve was all the brand building. Getting into a big grocery store is awesome, and we were very fortunate to have those relationships in place. But you also have to build a community. What’s your social media strategy? What does your merchandising strategy look like? How many weeks of the year are you going to be on promo?

At first, it was daunting. You're talking to anyone who will listen about your brand and reaching out to anyone in your network who has built one. "How did you do this? How much do you pay for social media? Do you use an agency or freelancers?" You’re asking what feel like rookie questions. We had been successful in our other professional endeavours, but this was a whole new game. Once you get past that, though, it's actually really fun, and sometimes scary, too.  

What do you want consumers to know when they’re walking through the produce section?

⎯⎯⎯ Ezio: I think a lot of consumers underestimate how long it takes for produce to get to the store and then into their homes when it’s not locally sourced. The strawberries you’re buying at the grocery store are seven to ten days from harvest by the time you get your hands on them — best case scenario. People walk into grocery stores, see all this produce, and don’t really think about the journey it took to get there. It’s all the more reason to buy local when you can. You’re getting food that’s been harvested more recently and hasn’t been sitting in transit or a warehouse for days on end. Matt: I feel as a society, we expect a lot from retail and food supply in terms of quality, availability and consistency, but then don't want the price to ensure that that happens. Ezio: We’ve also been trained for year-round seasonality, and people just maybe don't want accept that To Matt’s point, buying watermelons in February from Mexico that had to get picked green, are under ripe, sat on a truck for four days to make it here and then sat in a warehouse for another four days, are gonna taste like nothing, or they're gonna taste like shit, and they're gonna be $15. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Can't have your watermelon and eat it too.

⎯⎯⎯ Matt: Yeah, I wish society would go a little more old school. Just say, "There are no watermelons. Watermelons aren’t on the menu." You know what’s really good right now? California citrus. So we’re eating a lot of oranges—blood oranges, Cara Cara oranges. We’re passionate about food, so nothing bothers us more than quality complaints. But it’s like, “Yeah, man, it’s February 18th, there’s 70 centimetres of snow on the ground, and your watermelon is white because it was imported from southern Mexico, sat on a truck for six days, and just isn’t great.”

Do you source locally as much as possible? 

⎯⎯⎯ Ezio: We do, so we'll switch as much of our supply to local suppliers as soon as they're in season. 

More and more people are interested in and knowledgeable about food, cooking, even supply chains. Has that shift, or just consumer preferences for certain ingredients, changed what you source or who you source from at Bondi?

 ⎯⎯⎯ Ezio: Food trends in general have been accelerated by social media and we feel that in our business. One chef halfway across the world can put up a dish with Jimmy Nardello peppers on it, and then the next week, everyone's hitting you up for Jimmy Nardello peppers. That’s happening more frequently. You’re seeing that happen everywhere, not just at restaurants in downtown Toronto. The Hamilton restaurateur is aware of these trends now, and wants a more bougie city product.