58.9 F
San Diego
Monday, Mar 18, 2024
-Advertisement-

Local Flavor

The prospect of holiday traffic is now a much bigger deal for people like gourmet chocolate seller Jerry Swain.

“In retail, chocolate sales tend to be very seasonal,” said Swain, founder and CEO of Jer’s Chocolates in Solana Beach. “But with a location like the San Diego airport, we should be getting a good stream of foot traffic throughout this summer and most of the year.”

Swain’s newly opened store, inside Terminal 2 East at San Diego International Airport, is among several local brands recently added to the airport’s concessions menu, with more on the way.

Anticipating heightened demand for stores and eateries resulting from the addition of 10 new passenger gates — included in the $1 billion Green Build expansion wrapping up in August — airport operators decided to add dozens of new concessions, with an emphasis on homegrown restaurant and retail businesses.

“We made it very clear in our request for proposals that we wanted new businesses that would create a sense of place specific to San Diego,” said Nyle Marmion, concession development manager for the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, describing a planning process that began more than three years ago.

The airport in the past few months has added 16 new stores and eateries. By the time all of the planned new businesses are up and running in March 2014, the total selection will have grown from 55 to 87.

Tastes of the Town

In addition to Jer’s Chocolates, the current slate includes locally themed offerings such as Craft Brews on 30th Street, Gaslamp MarketPlace, and a newsstand store branded as 10News.

In coming months, those will be joined by familiar local brands including Phil’s BBQ, Stone Brewing Co., Warwick’s of La Jolla, Jack in the Box, Pannikin Coffee & Tea, Saffron Thai and Bankers Hill Bar & Restaurant.

For Jer’s Chocolates, which has a store adjacent to its Solana Beach headquarters office and also sells online, the high-visibility airport store gives his nine-year-old company access to local and national customers who otherwise wouldn’t be thinking about his products outside of Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas.

The 220-square-foot store will carry a full line of the company’s gourmet sweets, including chocolate bars and its top-selling Peanut Butter Balls. Shifts of 1 to 3 workers will be selling between 4:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. on most days at the airport, and Swain plans to get plenty of taste-test feedback on new products in the pipeline.

For some visitors, the candies will be a San Diego-centric souvenir to take back home.

“So many airports have the same mix of things, so you forget what city you’re actually in,” said Swain. “What’s happening now is more like what I see when I go to Hawaii, where you know exactly where you are because so many things being sold at their airport is indigenous to Hawaii.”

The creation of an airport version of Jer’s Chocolates, along with other local offerings, is the result of arrangements initiated by Florida-based concessions firm Stellar Partners Inc., which along with several other national concessionaires is working under a contract with the airport authority.

Stellar and its national competitors — including HMS Host, Hudson Group and Paradies Shops — have long offered concessions at San Diego International and airports nationwide, most often by licensing national brands such as Starbucks and McDonald’s.

San Diego is joining a national trend of airports now opting for locally themed concessions, in part for destination branding but primarily because such offerings have been shown to boost revenue for airports and local businesses in places including Hawaii and San Francisco.

San Francisco-based concessionaire High Flying Foods is looking to take its experience with that city’s international airport, where it has opened several locations of popular Bay Area restaurants, and apply it at Lindbergh Field.

During August and September, the company will be opening the local airport locations of Stone Brewing, Phil’s BBQ, Pannikin and Saffron Thai, among others to debut before year’s end.

Kevin Westlye, president of High Flying Foods, said that before being awarded its San Diego airport contract, the company set out to identify iconic and popular local restaurants. That included on-site taste-testing.

“We go to the restaurant before anybody knows who we are, and we just eat,” Westlye said.

Once arrangements are settled with a local restaurateur, the concessionaire works with the operator on the design and menu for the airport version, with the goal of offering at least 75 percent of the items that would be offered in non-airport locations.

Time considerations, for instance, prompted the concessionaire to offer Phil’s BBQ’s popular chicken items and baby back ribs at the airport location, but not the full-sized beef ribs that take longer to cook.

“At the airport, you have to go with the given that everybody is in a hurry,” Westlye said. “In a place like Phil’s, the ideal is to get customers served in about seven minutes or less.”

The airport location opening in August will mark continued expansion for Escondido-based Stone Brewing Co., which recently opened a new craft brewery-eatery in Point Loma and is in the process of opening a retail store in downtown San Diego.

Craft Beer Destination

Stone’s airport location will feature at least 15 craft brews on tap, with several popular food items, including its duck tacos. CEO and co-founder Greg Koch said it will also help burnish the region’s beer credentials with locals and visitors who still haven’t sampled the home-made brews.

“San Diego is known to be one of the best craft beer cities in the world, yet so many people leave here without ever knowing that,” said Koch.

Airport officials have projected that the new concessions, when all are up and running, will nearly double concessions employment at the airport in 2014, to approximately 1,200 workers.

National concessionaires usually foot the full costs of building and operating local airport businesses, including paying workers, and also pay the brand’s original operator pre-negotiated fees to cover certain design, licensing and related consulting costs.

Contract terms vary, but concessionaires can also pay the brand operator a set percentage of sales, in addition to the required sales portion and rent paid to the airport authority to operate in the facility.

According to local airport authority data, San Diego International generated total food and retail sales of more than $71.9 million in 2012, up 3.6 percent from 2011. Approximately 14.5 percent of 2012 gross sales were paid on average to the airport by concessionaires.

“These new places should allow the airport to generate a lot more revenue, because people now won’t necessarily have to go eat somewhere else before they get to the airport,” said Koch. “They will probably be more willing to spend more time at the airport before their flight, because they’ll have better places to go.”

-Advertisement-

Featured Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-

Related Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-