Mike Vernon, bakery specialist/ buyer and Evelyn Tinnin, bakery manager for Straub’s Clayton location. The Clayton bakery has had double digit sales increases in the last three months.

How does a company in business since 1901 stay relevant to today's consumer? By knowing its customers extremely well and meeting their changing demands. This is exactly how Straub's Fine Grocers, Clayton, Mo., has remained successful, and bakery has been integral in that success.

William Straub opened his first market in the Webster Groves neighborhood of St. Louis with a second location following in 1933 in Clayton. Subsequently, the family opened three more locations in Central West End, Town & Country and Ellisville. The Ellisville location opened last year, the first new store since 1966. J.W. “Trip” Straub III currently runs Straub's, the fourth generation of his family to operate the markets.

Straub's built its fifth location from the ground up, and at 40,000 sq. ft., it is more than three times the size of each of the four other locations, which average about 10,000 to 12,000 sq. ft. Bakeries average about 250 sq. ft., with production facilities in the Central West End and Ellisville locations. The newest store also includes Straub's Culinary Center, with several cooking classes for customers, including pastry making and cake decorating.

Every store is distinctly different to meet the needs of its unique customers, however, some things are true across all five locations. All serve upper income patrons who are in the top percentage of food expenditures. “Everything about every bakery is different in every location, but they all serve Straub's customers,” says Mike Vernon, Straub's bakery specialist/buyer. “Our customers are generally professionals and couples without children. We have a lot of wealthier people, but we also get some middle income customers who just like the quality that we offer.”

The Clayton store serves mostly professionals and is busiest during the week, especially between the lunch hours of 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The new Ellisville location is the only one that has a primary customer base of families and is busy on the weekends and evenings after work. Webster Groves gets a low number of high-end shoppers every day and Central West End (across the street from one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country) has the most traffic, but the customers tend to buy in small amounts because they often walk to the store. Each store's uniqueness adds to the perception that each in-store bakery is a local, neighborhood bakery.

Quality unchanged

“The demographics have stayed the same over the years,” Vernon adds. “That's part of our success—we aren't marketing to the people who are concerned with how much something costs. It only costs too much if they get home and they don't like it. We don't have to undersell just because the place down the street has butter cake for $1.99. Ours is better than that.”

The commitment to quality has been unchanged since the market opened. For example, Straub's is known for its meat; it is the only market in St. Louis that sells USDA prime beef, and all departments have to live up to that standard. Bakery is no exception.

The market added bakeries in the 1940s, and they have gone through several substantial production changes through the years. When the bakeries were first added, Straub's made all bakery products out of a central commissary; the product line consisted of desserts, pies and cakes and even a line of candies and ice cream.

In the 1970s, it switched to producing items in each of the locations, which it continued to do until this year when Vernon came on board in January. He grew up in his family's specialty market in Ohio, which is very similar to Straub's, before opening his own bakery. After that, he worked in the bakery department of 15-unit supermarket chain based in Cleveland.

Straub's bakeries were making only about a dozen items in-house and bringing in all others from five or six local vendors. One of Vernon's first decisions was to centralize production again, however not in a commissary. “Baking in each location was too inconsistent and too inefficient,” Vernon says. “Now, I can have one guy make all the Danish for all the stores as opposed to having five people make Danish five different ways with different levels of quality.”