Outdoor Gourmet rides growth trend

SANDPOINT — In business, less really can be more. One local company rides that adage like a rocket as it finds new ways to create more products out of the same basic resource.

But the story requires backing up before moving into the latest chapter of the Outdoor Gourmet growth story.

It has its beginnings in a mill on appropriately named Shingle Mill Road, where Alpine Cedar landed soon after moving to the area in 1992. It was there that owner Ernie Brandt geared up production of wood products commonly found in hot tub cabinets, birdhouses and sauna interiors.

Brandt’s business model was a study in sustainability — a push to get as much out of every piece of wood as possible. Even so, there were shorter mill ends that ended up in piles at various times throughout the year, pieces that were free for the taking for anyone needing a ready kindling supply.

Jumping ahead, those same, outcast piles of wood turned out to be the driving force behind a sharp increase in both sales and local payroll.

“When it comes to wood tech, nobody knows it better than Ernie,” said the owner’s daughter, Katie Bradish, who joined the company six years ago and is now the national director of programs for Outdoor Gourmet. “There were prime pieces of wood left over and the challenge was to find a market for them. Grilling planks were the perfect market.”

The firm lays no claim to inventing the idea, which has seen explosive popularity among backyard grillers and caterers for cooking fish and steaks.

“Northwest natives beat us by a couple thousand years,” Bradish said. “But the idea of food-safe, retail-ready grilling planks? Yes, we did come up with that.”

Food safe, in this case, means turning out product from non-treated wood that has no splinters and not a trace of sawdust when it reaches the end user. The designation also requires that only food-grade lubricants are used on the saws that cut the wood. With offshore grilling planks flowing into domestic markets, the food-safe distinction has been a hit with health-conscious brands.

More powerful still is Outdoor Gourmet’s skill at branding the planks for its wholesale customers. Prior to 2008, the grilling material had been “purely a niche product” aimed at small retailers and co-ops, Bradish explained. Things changed when the company started branding — quite literally branding — the names of larger, wholesale accounts into the wood pieces.

Sales popped as Fred Meyer stores began to sell Fred Meyer brand grilling planks. Whole Foods took the branding concept deeper still, requesting made-to-spec, store-specific logos so that a location in, say, Venice, Calif., would have product that reflected its unique brand image.

“Private labeling is what we do the very best,” said Bradish. “Everybody loves to see their name — their image — on things.”

Additional markets opened up, with national hardware stores featuring branded grilling planks in the grill section and major grocers jumping onto the bandwagon. Sales trends began a dramatic shift — where the planks accounted for about 7 percent of revenues in 2009, they make up more than 95 percent of sales today.

Outdoor Gourmet took the cue to heart, searching for new ways to get more product while leaving less waste.

The mainstay, 5- by 11-inch plank was joined by smaller, single-portion sizes, which then led to the creation of grilling chips. A thin veneer was developed into a grilling wrap, now a favorite with clients such as Hard Rock Café and Albertson’s, Bradish said.

Last year, Outdoor Gourmet set a goal of 100 percent fiber usage, helped in that direction by innovative lines that include the “Seconds Anyone?” grilling planks made from pieces that don’t make the cut for wholesale branding. Sold directly to caterers and through online stores on sites such as Amazon, Etsy and eBay, the line “eats up all of our seconds,” according to Bradish.

A more recent, second-tier product has joined the catalog as a “blackout brand.” When logos don’t come out crisply enough to pass through quality control, they are obscured by a branded overlay and the planks reach the marketplace as a lower-priced buying option.

Fiber usage doesn’t stop there. The mill sells its sawdust to nearby Lignetics for the manufacture of wood pellets and Pres-to-Logs. Any remaining fiber gets set aside to fuel the company’s onsite biomass backup power generator.

“We’re able to run our facility and create product from what is essentially a waste product,” said the program director, adding that the employer was awarded Forestry Stewardship Council certification for its efforts. “We start with a big, long piece of on-grade lumber and it just becomes a smaller and smaller piece.”

In operation since 1939, the building locals still call the “old Ponderay cedar mill” is considered to be home to the longest, continuously running wood products facility in the area. A total of 12 employees ran the place in 2008, when Outdoor Gourmet was just turning the corner into producing grilling planks.

Today, the company employs 42 people, with eight new hires in the last six months and “moving on up” based on results, Bradish noted.

“Sales were up about a third last year and the year before that, we were up 50 percent,” she said. “So we’re rockin’ it.”

The company prides itself in turning out made in the U.S.A., food-safe products. It takes just as much satisfaction in being able to call itself a family owned, Northwest-based operation. Along with Katie, two other Brandt sisters have joined their father in the company, with Erin Brandt working as marketing director and Jenny Brandt holding the title of customer care manager.

“You can really see the family connection,” Katie Brandt said, mentioning the fact that several local couples are on the payroll, further expanding the meaning of family within the ranks. “You can’t walk around here without running into a Brandt or someone who is Brandt-related.”

Outdoor Gourmet grilling planks come in best-selling cedar, as well as alder, hickory, cherry, maple and red oak varieties. Locally, the product is used at 41 South Restaurant and sold at both Yoke’s and Super 1 Foods.

Information: www.outdoorgourmet.com