From the Syracuse Post-Standard-
All in the Wegmans Family
Wegmans focuses future growth on the Northeast Sunday, May 20, 2007By Bob Niedt Staff writer
Wegmans Food Markets Inc. is one of the most respected supermarket companies in the world.
Its route to that summit goes through Central New York, the first region it expanded into after growing up in its hometown of Rochester starting in 1916.
Wegmans has expanded and evolved as it has grown, its footprint now reaching into the Washington, D.C., market by way of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
But it remains firmly in the Wegman family hands as the company transitions to a new generation. Its chief executive officer is Danny Wegman, 60, and its president is Danny's daughter, Colleen Wegman, 36. Another daughter, Nicole, 32, is heading Nicole's Wine & Spirits, a separate Wegmans venture that is tied to the company's interest in helping customers with wine choices.
Wegmans suffered a wrenching loss with the death a year ago of Danny's father, Wegmans patriarch and architect Robert B. Wegman, but his legacy lives on through philanthropy, especially to Catholic schools and colleges in the Rochester area, and the work of his wife, Margaret, and his children and grandchildren.
Danny Wegman and Colleen Wegman were in the Syracuse market recently touring the expanded DeWitt store, the largest Wegmans supermarket in the company's portfolio. Below are excerpts from a wide-ranging interview with The Post-Standard:
Q. Colleen, it's been a couple of years since you were named president of Wegmans. Has it - the job, the company - met your expectations?
Colleen Wegman: It's funny you ask me that. It hasn't seemed like necessarily a new assignment for me. This has been my life, to be a part of Wegmans. Because you grow up in the business, you feel like you are there to help in any way you can with whatever you are given. I consider every day a new opportunity. We always have new challenges, which makes it fun. So I'm having as much fun as I've ever had.
Danny Wegman: I'll tell you what's new. What's new is a little 1.5-year-old and a 3-year-old.
Colleen: (Laughs) Yes, what's happened in the past two years is that I now have two kids. Obviously, that's an exciting thing personally, but it's also been helpful to me in the business, because so many of our target customers are busy moms. It's given me a new perspective on how we might help with the fact that there are a lot people looking for ways to save time, to find healthy things for their families. It's helped us to focus on that, the fact that I'm going through the experience myself. So that's been new and fun.
Danny: It's really interesting having a family with different generations going through different things. It's been fascinating to see the evolutions we've gone through. Sunday family meals, for example. It used to be that Colleen and her husband would come down on Sundays, and (Nicole) and her husband (who have a 2-year-old), and we'd have kind of a long, extended event, cook different things and have this long, interactive family meal. Now that we have a bunch of 1-, 2- and 3-year-olds floating around, it changes everything.
Colleen: (Laughs) It's interactive in a new way. We don't sit quite as long, have as many courses.
Danny: We still have the family meals, but we do them a lot differently, a lot simpler. That's one of the big things we've learned. And for Colleen to be the mother of two young children and working full time being president of our company, she doesn't have a lot of time when she gets home to feed the kids. So she is looking for good solutions to do that. That helps push us in directions where we can keep on coming up with meals that are either very easy for our customers to make or that they can take home or that Colleen can take home, and that's just what she does.
Colleen: I think we are always looking for ways that we can help. My dad is always challenging us to think for ourselves. What is it that we need? And we're recognizing the needs for ourselves, but also many of our customers who are asking us, "How can you help me get dinner on the table that is quick and gives me some health benefits at the same time, and is also affordable?" So it's a real focus for us: How can we help make that meal occasion more enjoyable overall? Whether it's through prepared foods or convenient items throughout the stores or just helping people put together things in a simple fashion that tastes good. So we're very focused on that as a company.
Q.
What are you doing to take this forward?
Colleen: What we're finding is that people are asking us for help with cooking techniques. So we spend a lot of time on one technique throughout an entire season that helps provide assistance for customers in cooking and also helps provide all the ingredients together in one place at our meal stations, with an educated person there to help. Our meal coaches are in the front of every one of our produce departments as you walk in our store. And they've been the primary point of contact to really help people with the cooking techniques and to try and make that meal easier. And also to allow them to taste it, that make sure they try it, and their kids get a chance to try it, to see if it will go over well at home.
Some of the other things we are working on are prepared foods, that when you don't want to cook at all, you can buy something prepared.
Q. With the retirement of senior vice president in charge of the Syracuse district Jerry O'Dell after 50 years (see accompanying story) and the promotion of longtime employee Shari Constantine to Jerry's post, can you talk about some of the values that drive the company and keep longtime employees?
Colleen: The one thing that we always know is that these folks and people throughout our company are bringing our values to life. We have five core values (see accompanying box) we all try to work on every day. They hang on the wall of our stores, but just don't hang on the wall. We see examples of them every day, all through our company, through all 35,000 employees.
Danny: It's real because we didn't make up those values and then say we want to do them. They were values that Jerry had and Shari had, and we wrote them down. It was actually in Syracuse in 2001 that we first talked about them. We hadn't written them down before.
You haven't asked about my dad not being around. It's funny, as we were talking about the things we have, this is where my dad is still around. Basically, those were his values. I think that's what continues at Wegmans. It's his true legacy. The other things we may tinker with or change; those are our values and we're sticking to them.
Q. what other concepts are you looking to grow within the company? There's been some movement with wine and spirits.
Danny: Our family has been in the wine and spirits business for at least 40 years. As we opened in Virginia, where you're only able to sell wine but the wine was right in the food store, the connection between food and wine just became so apparent. This is something our customers really want. They want to know what kind of wine goes with which meal. We decided if we're really going to help people with food, that we needed to help them with wine, too. We just kind of woke up to that. Our business grows if we help our customers. That's the simple way we look at it. What are their needs? It's always how we look at it.
(Wine can be sold in grocery stores in Virginia, but not in New York.)
Colleen: I think another need is people are looking for help with their health. Our mission as a business has been to help people with healthier and better lives. We have to figure out what we might work on that will really make a difference and help people around the five principles we've defined. Eat well, live well.
Q. How would you characterize the Syracuse market now? Is it mature? Are there ways to take it forward?
Danny: The fun thing about our business is that people change. People's habits and desires change over time. Take our business here. Our first store in the Syracuse market was the John Glenn store, which opened in 1968. That store is certainly a lot different than the one we opened there last year. You see an evolution; what we say is we follow our customers a few steps ahead. It's our job to anticipate where our customers want to go. If we have to regroup and refigure things out, we will do that.
Q. Q.
Colleen, with your age and gender, do you find many peers in this industry?
Colleen: I never really thought about it as male or female. I don't look at it in that way. But the industry is changing. What I see in the industry that is a little different at Wegmans - and I also see at Price Chopper - there's much less change in a family business than in the rest of the industry. This industry is constantly turning people over. Fortunately, there's a bit of a different culture here. You see people grow up together, and you see it at Price Chopper, another wonderful family business that we have great respect for.
Q. What about the supermarket trend toward smaller stores? Does that concern you that the industry is moving that way when you're building these bigger stores?
Danny: Actually, we're happy about it. Everyone has to have their own strategy. Our strategy is basically to have large, high-volume stores that offer a lot of services to customers, that allows them a full spectrum of whatever they want to buy.
We are still a very small company in the food business. So we really try to stick to a suburban model, where we can do an extremely good job at what we do - and not do too many formats, because that distracts you.
Q.
Where do you think the growth of the company geographically is right now?
Danny: We're a Northeast company. The challenge we always face is finding locations. Right now in the Northeast, we're focusing somewhere between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., where primarily we will be growing. We only build a few stores a year. Our goal is to get better where we are. It's why we're redoing this store, why we redid John Glenn last year. We see things that our customers need. It takes a lot of work and a lot of investment to keep on providing customers what they need. Our basic plan is to grow everywhere.
Q.
Colleen, in staying one or two steps ahead of the customers, organics was one, with Wegmans' in-store Nature's Marketplace sections. You personally were kind of out front there in the grocery industry in leading Nature's Marketplace. Where do you see that going?
Colleen: That's a very exciting one for us, because it's one of the fastest-growing areas in the company. You're right, the DeWitt store had our second Nature's Marketplace. At the time, it was more of a unique department. Today, it's much more supported and much more mainstream, the product is accessible and convenient and a product that tastes a lot better than it did 13 years ago. It has evolved and improved and our customers are looking for them to make them be healthier. Quality has absolutely improved in organic produce. It should be as good or better than anything we sell in the store. Customers are asking for it.
Danny: We're starting an organic farm (in Canandaigua, on 20 acres near Danny Wegman's home). And the reason we're doing it is organic growing is a little different in this region. What we like to do is to buy from local farmers. We were concerned about asking them to switch to organics and maybe they wouldn't know how to do that. We're trying to come up with procedures and practices to share with the growers, just like we do in our stores. The approach we use in our stores is to perfect something in one store and share it with other stores. We want to perfect organic farming in this region and share it with the farmers who want to grow that way in this region. We see a big interest in it from our customers.
You can contact Bob Niedt at 470-2264 or
bniedt@syracuse.com
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