Food Marketing Culture

How Goya became your go-to at the grocery store

August 25, 2013
By Lydia DePillis

About a year ago, in Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, an independent grocer called Bestway changed hands. The new owner is In Suk Pak, a South Korean by way of Pennsylvania. He renamed the store Bestworld, replacing the second word of the big-block letters out front. He rejiggered the store’s product mix to fit the neighborhood’s changing demographics, adding gourmet chips and high-end beers and Asian items like wasabi peas and dried seaweed.

But there was one aisle he didn’t touch: Goya’s.

Festooned with blue Goya-labeled tape and a Goya-logo spice rack, the aisle is densely packed with sacks, cans, boxes, bottles and jars of every imaginable bean, grain, sauce, juice and spice. The Goya salesperson just tells him what he needs to fill the section, and he’s happy to take the advice.

“I’m not Latino. I don’t know what they eat,” says Pak, shuffling around in a pink striped polo shirt supervising stocking on a Wednesday morning. Plus, he says, the neighborhood’s non-Hispanic residents will buy Goya, too.

Just a block away, Progreso International also stocks Goya products – they’re cheap and of good quality, the proprietor says.

That level of trust among urban Hispanic communities has landed Goya in nearly every corner bodega and medium-size independent grocery store like Bestworld. And while Goya seems exotic, the food is mostly not imported, or even run by people with roots in Latin cultures.
Behind the label

The company, in fact, is based in New Jersey. It was founded 77 years ago by Spaniards who had come to New York through Puerto Rico. It has hired enough natives to develop a flavor profile that’s close to the real thing and has marketed itself as an Hispanic-owned company.

Now, it’s the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States, with $1.3 billion in sales last year (still a long way behind market giants like General Mills, which brought in $16.7 billion in 2012).

But the burgeoning Hispanic population isn’t enough for Goya. It has moved into other foreign cuisines, like Indian and Chinese, in a bid to become the food company for all people new to America. It’s also developing products for second and third generations of immigrants, who might want something pre-cooked but still homey-tasting, or who might have intermarried with other nationalities and want to mix everything together (“Latin fusion” is featured prominently in the website’s recipe section).

“It’s a United Nations kind of label,” says Bob Gorland, a supermarket consultant at Matthew P. Casey & Associates. He regards Goya, more than any other brand, as a section unto itself, much like the kosher aisle or natural foods area.

Now, as the “general market” becomes more interested in ethnic cuisines, Goya has positioned itself as the “authentic” option that you don’t have to rummage through ethnic markets to find. In other words, Goya is becoming white.

Which, commercially, is a pretty unbeatable approach.

Goya – so named after the Spanish painter because founder Prudencio Unanue Ortiz liked the simplicity and vague familiarity of the name – started out packing and selling olives and olive oil in Brooklyn. It’s now a sprawling network of 16 worldwide processing and distribution centers, mostly based in the United States. In Puerto Rico and Spain, Goya now supplies the reverse immigrant population from Latin American countries.

The company headquarters is across the street from the Secaucus, N.J., train station. To see the actual packing under way, visitors don a hairnet and earplugs and push through a door to the factory floor (most of the canning is done in Buffalo, N.Y.).

From there, it’s another very short cab ride to the cavernous warehouse, which is stacked floor to ceiling both with gigantic sacks of raw ingredients on their way to packaging as well as Goya’s 2,200 finished products (plus quite a few products that other big brands like Nestle pay the company to store and distribute).
The Goya way

That Goya has warehouses at all is unusual. Many big food companies ship their products directly to warehouses belonging to grocery chains, like Safeway, which load their own trucks from there.

Goya always has done direct store delivery – “DSD” in industry jargon – because, as the owners see it, every store has a different audience. The sales staff researches local immigrant groups with the help of a business intelligence tool called Geoscape, as well as more enterprising techniques, like hanging out at the local money transfer franchise to see where people are sending checks home to. That way, Goya knows how to stock exactly what Cubans or Salvadorans or Peruvians are looking for, which creates brand loyalty.

“To us, it’s important to make the connection through a product that maybe we’re not going to sell truckloads of, but we’re going to have the product on the shelf so when a consumer goes in they say, ‘Wow, I can relate to Goya because it’s authentic, this product makes me feel like I’m at home,’ ” says Peter Unanue, the chief executive’s younger brother and an executive vice president in charge of distribution.

Often, Goya’s representatives even will help the big supermarkets decide how to stock the rest of their store to welcome local immigrant groups, like selling plantains and yucca in the produce section if there are lots of Mexicans living nearby, and consulting on the right cuts of meat.

In more and more demographics, Goya is now familiar.

“People have the tendency to be a little more creative with what they’re cooking, and I think they get that alternative with the products Goya offers,” says Gary Budd, who manages stocking for Giant Foods in the middle Atlantic.

Even Wal-Mart is seeing things Goya’s way. “When we first started to do business with them, they wanted to put a generic program in place,” Lopez says. “It wasn’t successful because of the diverse ethnicities.”

Goya certainly isn’t without competition – from brands like Del Monte and Bush’s, but also often from supermarkets themselves. Giant and Target will put a store-brand can of beans next to Goya’s, at a few nickels off the price. In those situations, Goya likes to contend that its products have a higher quality than the generic brand.

Ubiquity, however, is an even bigger advantage for Goya than perceptions of quality. Food bloggers sometimes specify Goya ingredients because it’s the easiest way to identify what to look for. Yvette Marquez runs a popular Mexican food website called Muy Bueno. She started out in El Paso, Texas, where there were lots of options for ingredients. Now she’s in Denver, where she’s found that ethnic food aisles are more limited to Goya products. “I’ve recommended Goya products because I know people will be able to find it,” she says. Plus, they have items like ready-made empanada dough.

But, she notes, it’s not exactly gourmet fare. The hipster foodies still probably will seek out super-specialty items in bodegas that carry things the supermarkets won’t. For everyone else, there’s Goya.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/23/how-goya-brought-ethnic-food-to-white-america/