It's all about the brownie | As the stars beg for more, Simply Divine Brownies of Brunswick fights to keep up with demand
Simply Divine Brownies are everywhere. Ask anybody who's anybody in New York or L.A. They were in $600 gift bags for an Oscar party in February, catching the eyes of rapper Lil' Kim, party girl Tara Reid and "The Nanny" herself, Fran Drescher. Last year, the brownies landed in the pages of celebrity gossip rags like Life & Style and In Touch.
They've been on TV, too. Last March, Oprah gushed over a Simply Divine gift pack on her show. In December, company owner Trina Beaulier and her daughter Meggen made brownies on "The Today Show" as Al Roker looked on. In January, foodie queen Rachael Ray served the brownies on her daytime talk show, bestowing on them her "Snack of the Day" honor.
These appearances have had huge rewards for the plucky Brunswick brownie company. The spot on "The Today Show" alone prompted 10,000 people to place Simply Divine orders online, where a normal week during the holiday season would bring about 1,000, according to Meggen Beaulier, the company's president and chief operating officer. And thanks to that attention, Simply Divine's sales more than doubled during each of the last two years. (Simply Divine declined to disclose detailed financial information.) Meanwhile, retail outlets like Bloomingdale's, Hannaford and Whole Foods have been inquiring for months about carrying the brownies, says Trina Beaulier.
As a result, Simply Divine has been scrambling to keep up with demand. Currently, their sales are roughly divided between corporate clients, Internet sales, and the brownies they sell at the small retail operation in their Brunswick facility, but to land in a big retailer like Whole Foods, the company has to transition from a 15-employee, make-it-by-hand gourmet brownie company to a highly automated brownie-makin' machine. Just to supply the Home Shopping Network, which wants Trina and Meggen Beaulier to pitch their products live this year, Simply Divine would need to supply 60,000 brownies in a 48-hour period. The most it's ever shipped is 7,000 over a week's time.
The transition from boutique brownie maker to mass producer won't be easy. Distributing the product, targeting the right markets and honing prices is difficult even for the most experienced specialty foods company. But Simply Divine is forging ahead with its expansion plans. Trina Beaulier hopes to have Simply Divine Brownies in grocery stores by next year, so the company in February hired a consultant to help draft a commercialization plan. Meanwhile, the Beauliers are developing a line of frozen and dry mixes, and in May they'll test a custom-made brownie-cutting machine. The goal, they say, is to become a nationally recognized brand.
Still, the company is moving carefully to make that happen. "It's a very delicate balance between taking off and being realistic about what you can handle," cautions Trina Beaulier.
Celebrity pitch
Trina Beaulier never intended to have a career in the brownie business. She originally started Simply Divine with a friend, Sue Rand, after they both retired from teaching elementary school and wanted to do something fun. "We were thinking about something that would keep us busy," Trina Beaulier says.
In 2004, Beaulier and Rand stocked up on snacks during a summer road trip to New York, and realized that the brownies they bought were awful. "We just threw them in the back. They weren't worth the effort to chew them," Beaulier says. "I thought, 'We can do better.'"
They started whipping up brownies in their home kitchens. In less than a year, Beaulier and Rand had developed their signature confection — dense, chewy, indulgent brownies topped with a half-inch-thick layer of buttercream frosting — and were taking 20-30 orders a week. To meet demand, the pair moved the company into a 2,000-square-foot space in Brunswick's Fort Andross mill.
That spring — May 6, 2005, to be exact — Simply Divine hit the jackpot. Daily Candy, a New York-based trendspotting e-newsletter, included an item about Simply Divine Brownies in its daily email, saying that Rand and Beaulier had turned a kitchen hobby into a "chocoholic's American Dream." (Rand pulled out of the company last summer, and was replaced Meggen Beaulier, who stepped in as president and chief operating officer.)
Until the Daily Candy mention, a good day for Simply Divine meant about 20 orders. The newsletter prompted a run on brownies, with 500 orders coming in over the next two days — the largest batch of orders the company had faced. Calls came immediately from The Food Network and Food & Wine magazine. An appearance on NBC's "The Today Show" and a mention on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" followed. "One media outlet really does feed another because they all have their ear to the ground," says Julie Restuccia, the company's executive vice president.
And for a company like Simply Divine, a few seconds with a star like Oprah are worth millions in advertising dollars. Sometimes, a celebrity clutching your product is even better than ads, says John Lord, chair of the food marketing department at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "There's so much [advertising] clutter out there," he says. "One of the ways of breaking through the clutter is to get a connection with a celebrity."
Simply Divine has embraced the selling power of celebrities over the past few years, finding ways to get its product into the celebrity gift bags handed out at star-studded happenings like Academy Award viewing parties and charity events. Last month, Simply Divine sent 140 brownies to Las Vegas for a gift bag — or, in this case, gift luggage — given to red-carpet stars at the Muhammed Ali Celebrity Fight Night XIII, a fundraiser held in Phoenix, Ariz. So far, Simply Divine brownies have been included in gift bags for a half-dozen celebrity events.
To get their products into the bags, suppliers often pay a placement fee to gift-bag companies that generally ranges from $500 to $2,000. A particularly successful strategy employed by Simply Divine is to send the gift-bag firms brownies instead, sometimes providing hundreds of brownies to serve at the event itself or as a pre-event gift. Paying in brownies isn't necessarily less expensive than paying in cash, Meggen Beaulier says, but the dollars go farther. "It's like product placement," Meggen says. "If you're Pepsi, and you're sponsoring an awards show, isn't it better to have the judges drink Pepsi than to buy an ad?" (For more on the celebrity gift-bag biz, see "Wanna be in showbiz?" below.)
Simply Divine isn't the only Maine company getting its wares into the hands of George Clooney, Naomi Watts and Will Farrell. Gardiner-based Isamax Snacks has landed its whoopie pies in gift bags for roughly 20 film premieres and Oscar parties since 2003.
Owner Amy Bouchard says the publicity has been helpful; the company ships 8,000-10,000 pies per week, a 400% increase from 2003, she says. Even so, she says, she's careful about not relying too heavily on publicity boosts, which tend to be short-lived. "You get that exposure, and in the snap of a finger it goes away," she says.
The challengeof growth
Corporate clients have been a staple of Simply Divine's business. Since it launched, it's worked with nearly 500 companies, including TD Banknorth, Cisco, UNUM, and Anthem. The company has become particularly adept at customizing brownies with, for example, corporate logos, which it prints on thin sheets of frosting and applies to the brownies.
With Simply Divine swimming in great press these days, the trick is to grow while continuing to nurture the channels that have provided the company with a foundation. At them moment, though, demand is far greater than supply; Simply Divine is asking would-be clients like Bloomingdale's and the Home Shopping Network to wait while the company ramps up.
It's a problem frequently faced by specialty-food companies. "Making the leap from selling directly to consumers to going through retail outlets — it's a whole different game," says Don Morrison, owner of Portland-based gourmet chowder company Morrison's Maine Course. Making that consumer-to-retail leap is a crucial step for these companies, says John Lord at St. Joseph's University, and as many as 90% of them fail in the attempt. "It's an incredibly competitive industry," he says.
Hoping to avoid that fate, Simply Divine last summer began considering strategies to handle that growth in demand, including streamlining production, a process it started last fall with help from the Augusta-based Maine Manufacturing Extension Partnership, which helped Simply Divine standardize its recipes and production techniques.
Key to that streamlining process is automation. Cutting the brownies by hand is labor-intensive; to cut Simply Divine's "silhouettes," or shaped brownies, production workers have to bear down with a cutter and delicately work the brownies one by one out of the cutter with a spatula — a process that takes a few minutes per brownie. To speed this along, the company in May will begin testing a machine to cut brownies in just a few seconds. The $20,000 device, called a gantry machine, is designed to cut brownies 12 times faster than cutting by hand, producing as many as 80 brownies every 10 minutes, Trina Beaulier says.
Meanwhile, Simply Divine in February hired Suzanne Hamlin, owner of Portland consulting firm Transformative Knowledge Group, to help develop a commercialization plan in hopes of getting Simply Divine Brownies into grocery stores like Hannaford and Whole Foods. The plan would detail the distribution process and identify which of Simply Divine's products would bring the most profit, says Hamlin. The Beauliers also plan to launch a line of frozen and dry brownie mixes next year in grocery stores, though the details of the launch are still unclear.
There are many more options for growth, says Meggen Beaulier, including smaller retail outlets, catalogues, celebrity events, or even television sales on the Home Shopping Network. "We know we're positioning ourselves to be the leader in the industry," she says. "But the question is, what channels of distribution do we choose to get ourselves there?"
While the Simply Divine star rises, Trina Beaulier knows it's bad business to assume that today's orders will still be coming in tomorrow. At the same time, she's confident that her company's products are well-positioned to ride out the quirks and fads of the market. "You can be the thing of the moment if you don't have any substance," she says. "But I think we're going to be a tried and true product."
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