Adventure in Food
At Edible, we’re all about being #loyaltolocal, but occasionally, damn it, we want that chub of pimento-cured chorizo salame smoked with paprika and Sangiovese wine, fistfuls of Marcona almonds fried skin-off in sunflower oil, addictively sweet fresh Black Mission figs, even, dare we say it, the occasional elk strip loin.
One does not want to live on butternut squash, New York State cheddar cheese and farm-fresh burgers alone.
That’s where Adventure in Food comes in. Technically a B-to-B operation, intrepid eaters are permitted to visit their cavernous (15,000-square-foot) warehouse in Menands to pick up the kind of specialty items Andrew Zimmern travels to Syria and the Outback for—if they call ahead with a specific order. (Their website offers a complete list of their 1,500-plus products on offer, from obscure fruits and vegetables to matcha tea powders to funky sauces and marinades you didn’t know you wanted until you learned of their existence (holla, Japanese white soy sauce!).
But what Adventure in Food is doing, with its handcrafted French bread and truffle-infused butter, is bringing the world to in-the-know chefs and shops of the Capital District and beyond.
“Our mission is to research, seek out and source specialty food that bridges the gap between consumers and the origins of real food,” says Adventure in Food president Eric Guenther. “We work to streamline distribution channels and make these products easily accessible to consumers.”
The vast majority of their direct pool of clients can be divided into two sectors: food service and retail. Restaurants make up about 75% of their sales, with the remaining 25% comprised of both wholesale customers and retail markets like co-ops, specialty grocery stores and farm stands.
Founded in 1980 by Joe Messina as Specialty World Foods, what would become Adventure in Food brought Guenther to the helm in 2007 (he was previously the GM) and expanded the company to have a “more global, quality-driven focus with special attention to small, artisanal producers and growers and food steeped in tradition and community,” Danielle Woodruff, procurement and media director, explains.
“We work with small to large regional outlets across New York, from Plattsburgh to New York City, Massachusetts and Vermont,” Woodruff says. “We love working with clients one-on-one. Part of our mission is to get people back to the origins of real food, like working with restaurants to get hormone-infused factory chicken off of their menu and replaced with a responsibly, sustainably raised product.”
The Adventure in Food warehouse (which recently doubled in size after they leased the 7,500-square-foot warehouse next door) is an edible safari. In comes the edible gold foil and kangaroo loin to be stored until one of the company’s hundreds of clients calls. From there, it gets loaded into one of a small fleet of six refrigerated trucks from their warehouse and delivered, sometimes within hours. And no, that kind of service doesn’t allow them to compete on price with the slower-moving, but inevitably cheaper, national distribution channels.
“We don’t try to compete with any national distributors pricewise simply because we have a completely different business model,” Guenther explains. “If a customer asks a broad-line distributor for a specialty product, turnaround is at least a week. For our customers, turnaround is sometimes less than 12 hours. Quality, knowledge, customer service and speed make us stand out.”
Comparing the pork a national distributor can offer on the fly to what Adventure in Food has in stock—Heritage Berkshire and Spanish Ibérico pork—is like comparing the taste of a commodity apple that’s been sitting in a refrigerated warehouse for six months to a freshly plucked Golden Russet from an orchard in October. (Which would you rather eat?)
“Ibérico can go for five to 10 times the price of the industrially farmed pork the large distributors sell, but they’re completely different products,” Guenther insists. “Ibérico is special starting with the Pata Negra hog; it not only builds superior intramuscular fat for unparalleled marbling and texture, it’s one of the few breeds adapted to being pasture raised. It forages largely on acorns, which gives the meat exceptional flavor.”
Every salesperson at Adventure in Food, from Guenther to Woodruff to their sales force headed up by Jeremy Soto, is trained to know their line of products intimately, so that when a chef calls up in a panic for a recommendation on a new cheese plate that will off er a variety of milk sources, flavors, textures, ages and countries of origin, and still deliver a chef 30% food cost, anyone can help the chef out.
“That’s how we stay in business,” Woodruff says. “We talk to people who don’t have a lot of time. Chefs cut to the chase and they pepper us with questions about everything from the fl avor profi le of the animal to plating suggestions to how it was raised.”
Woodruff and Guenther are blunt about their approach to food sourcing: Simply put, it has to be the best.
“If I can get a DOP-certified raclette from France that several chefs are clamoring for, and we’re going to offer a similar product made in New York, it has to be just as good,” Woodruff says. “We appreciate and support the local food movement, but the world is fl at in terms of the quality we’re seeking.”
Guenther concurs, adding that in the past 11 years, they have added categories in pastry, charcuterie, local cheese and, most recently, a thriving produce division. “Growing numbers of people in the area are learning about the Slow Food movement, the health benefi ts of grass-fed-and-finished meats, what goes into making cheese and how and where their produce is grown,” Guenther says.
The market is responding to their passion and unwavering commitment to finding the best food the world has to offer. In the past five years, their sales have grown 100%, an astounding figure Guenther attributes to consumers demanding responsibly raised quality food from all corners of the earth.
The next time you’re digging into a restaurant cheese plate with washed-rind buffalo milk and tangy, soft sheep’s milk blue or an entrée featuring grass-fed Wagyu beef tri-tips, chances are, you can thank the crew at Adventure in Food for the pleasure.
Or, if like one group of barbecuing fanatics does every summer, you find yourself wanting to throw a Predators Grilling Predators party, you can call them with all of your weird questions, desires and demands.
If anyone has what you’re looking for, it’s Adventure in Food.
