business

Deep inside a new test kitchen at Supervalu headquarters, a row of canned peas glint under bright lights. Each can’s contents have been spilled into a foam tray. A man in a white lab coat hovers nearby.

“We’re not too happy,” says the lab coat, a food scientist named Obel Hernandez. “We’re not too thrilled.” He counts the mashed, dented or smushed ones, enters notes into a laptop computer, then considers what happened that morning during the testing of carrots: They were too mushy.

Anywhere else, this kind of attention to the constitution of canned vegetables would be frivolous, or even alarming, but for Supervalu it may be how they build sales in a stifling economy. The pea count — and the new test kitchen in which it was conducted — is at the heart of a reorientation in culture and purpose at the Eden Prairie-based company, which until recently made half of its money from distributing food to other supermarkets.

Since last year, when it bought the beleaguered Albertson’s Inc. chain and became one of the largest supermarket operators in the country, Supervalu Inc. has reinvented itself as a retail powerhouse, generating 80 percent of its $40 billion annual revenue from a collection of 2,500 supermarkets serving dozens of cities under 14 store names, from Cub Foods to Acme to Bristol Farms.

Pea by pea, the company plans to take stock of the 10,000 to 12,000 products sold under 100 or so company-owned labels and eliminate brands that don’t measure up.

That means tests on a wide array of products sold as supermarket versions of national labels — everything from canned vegetables to foam cups, vitamins to whiskey. (Wine and hard-liquor sales are allowed in supermarkets in some of the states in which Supervalu operates.)

The result should be a slimmed-down catalog of 20 to 25 store brands, said Ryan Briggs, Supervalu’s director of product development.

“We want to focus more on branding, and less on just getting a product out on the shelf to sell it,” he said during a recent tour of the new test kitchen.

It’s all part of an effort to become more like a consumer-products company that builds brands, Briggs said.

If it works, the branding effort should help Supervalu fend off the effects of two negative trends for mainstream grocers. For one thing, supermarkets have fought a decades-long decline in the number of meals a typical family eats at home each week. And then there’s the problem of fringe operators like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Aldi and numerous food co-ops, which use specialty business models to draw customers out of the one-size-fits-all supermarkets favored by Supervalu.

It’s a major undertaking, and the company took over a vacant office building specifically for the effort. Though it hasn’t officially opened, the company’s new East View Innovation Center, tucked off of Hwy. 212 in a building formerly owned by Best Buy Co. Inc., now houses all of Supervalu’s marketing and merchandising employees.

At its center sits the new test kitchen. This is entirely new terrain for Supervalu, which didn’t have its own kitchen before the Albertson’s merger. And even though Albertson’s employees could boast of a kitchen at the company’s headquarters in Boise, Idaho, it was tucked behind a nondescript door.

The Supervalu test kitchen, on the other hand, sits behind floor-to-ceiling windows, all the better for the company’s marketing teams to look on and be reminded of Supervalu’s new direction, Briggs said.

“The big buzzword is being consumer-centric, and being around the customer and what they want,” Briggs said.

The kitchen comes with its own “sensory testing” room nearby, a place for taste tests with as many as 10 volunteers at a time. The center is also where food companies make their pitches to Supervalu, visiting with marketing teams that sample the foods that may one day end up sporting a Supervalu label.

“They might come to us and say, ‘Try this product out,’ and we might say, ‘We don’t really like it; we want you to change the curry level or the sweetness, or modify this or that,’” Briggs said.

A Minnesota tradition

The test kitchen is also home to the company’s version of Betty Crocker, culinary development manager Genie Nicholas, who is the chef behind the recipes printed on store-brand foods. A recent day found her in the kitchen experimenting with croquettes.