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Food industry
likes Stew Sr.'s fresh approach
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By Francis X. Fay Jr.
Hour Senior Writer |
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(Article Reprinted from
the November 29,2002 edition)
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| NORWALK - Stew Leonard Sr. has been named one of the top "visionaries" who transformed food retailing. |
| The founder of Stew Leonard's stores was named among the 50 greatest food retailers in the nation's history by Supermarket News, the leading weekly magazine of the food industry. |
 All
50 were chosen for raising the industry to new levels of excellence over
the years. The people on the list were picked by the news editors of the
magazine based on formal nominations and feedback from the industry, and
they are included in the issue to help commemorate the magazine's 50th anniversary. |
| The cover of the magazine, headlined "The Fifty Leaders who Transformed Retailing," contains stamp-sized photos of each of the honorees. |
| "I couldn't be more pleased to be in this kind of company," Leonard said in an interview this week. "To be with such extraordinary businessmen as (the late) Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, Saul Price of Price Club (now Costco) and Robert Magowan of Safeway is just wonderful. I couldn't be more pleased." |
| The honor is sure to elict congratulatory calls from Leonard's scores of friends in and out of the food industry for the second time in the last month. Just two weeks ago, a character in the hit HBO series "The Sopranos" mentioned Stew LeonardÆs store. |
| "That brought calls from all over," Leonard said. |
| The magazine contacted him two weeks ago to say he'd been selected for the group cited in the 84-page Nov. 25th issue. He is included in a subgroup of five retailers who have defined the word "fresh" as in fresh foods. The other four are entrepreneurs who have created successful retail supermarket chains in the Midwest. |
| The Leonard profile singles out three contributions to retailing that have made Stew Leonard's stores unique - the Walt Disney-like approach to creating a merchandising environment, the exceptional customer service and the accent on quality fresh food. |
| Using the slogan "You have to own a cow to get fresher milk," Leonard moved what had been an old-fashioned milk processing plant for home delivery from Catherine Street to Westport Avenue in 1969. |
| "Every knowledgeable person in the dairy business told me I should have my head examined," Leonard told the magazine. "But customers seemed to enjoy cutting out the middle man and getting their milk directly from the source." |
| Starting with just the staples carried on the old milk trucks, the store proved a smashing success while offering only a few items, but merchandisers of other products eventually broke through and convinced Leonard to expand his inventory which now stands at 1,500 items. |
| With live action figures animating the store and sample-laden store associates roaming about, the business has developed a personality that is now appealing to a second generation. It has gone through 28 additions and now covers 14 acres on both sides of Westport Avenue. |
| "My idol was Walt Disney, and I always remember one of his quotes," Leonard told the magazine. "'Do such a good job that customers come back and bring a friend.'" That's a great line. Only happy customers come back." |
| Now a three-store chain with branches in Danbury and Yonkers, N.Y., a fourth store is slated for Farmingdale, Long Island, sometime in 2004. |
| From its earliest days, the stores' motto (now copyrighted) has been "Rule #1 - The customer is always right. Rule # 2 - If the customer is ever wrong, reread Rule #1." |
| As they've been able to do since the beginning, customers of the Norwalk store can still watch the milk pasteurized and containerized before their eyes. The milk for all three stores is delivered fresh from the Leonard farm in Ellington, after the daily milking of the 2,000 cows there. All of it is pasteurized and processed in Norwalk. The dairy farm is the only source of supply owned by the Leonard family. All other items are purchased in bulk from other producers. |
| "Our method of operation is to focus on the fresh foods and stick to the basics," he told the magazine. "We're not trying to be a supermarket, and we don't really compete with them. But we are competing for the customer. It's not very complicated, but it can be difficult." |
| The magazine notes that Stew Leonard Sr.'s retail innovations are revered in the fresh food industry despite his plea of guilty to a $17 million tax fraud scheme in 1993, a sum he repaid while also serving a 52-month jail term. |
| He has since relinquished day-to-day control of the company to his older son, Stew Leonard Jr., and daughters, Beth and Jill. Younger son, Tom, recently opened his own fresh foods store in Richmond, Va. Tom Leonard's Farmers' Market is similar in style but slightly smaller at 1,000 items than the three stores in this area. |
| Tom, once manager of the Danbury store, was a consultant to Asda Supermarkets, England's largest supermarket chain, for a period before starting the Richmond operation. |
| Stew Leonard Sr. and his wife, Marianne Guthman Leonard, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary Oct. 15 by taking 23 of their immediate family members to the Princess Hotel in Bermuda where they had gone on their own honeymoon in 1952. |
| "That was special," he said from the Virginia home of his son, Tom. "The highlight was a 30-minute video of our life from Norwalk High School to now. It was really moving. We have a lot to be thankful for." |
