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Amy's Kitchen
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Healthy Eating for Busy People
 




 

 

Introducing Amy's Kitchen

1) Introduction
2) Andy Berliner Speaks
3) In the News & Magazines
4) Natural Food Market
5) A Product List




 

The 21st Natural Products Expo West
Anaheim, California:  March 8-11, 2001




 

1) Introduction


Amy's Kitchen began when our daughter Amy was born in 1987. As busy parents, we searched for convenient, organic, vegetarian meals that tasted good, and found there were none in the marketplace. Realizing that there must be other people like ourselves, we decided to set up a company to fill the need. Today, the company which started in our home kitchen and barn, has become the most popular and well loved provider of frozen natural meals, producing and selling more than 50,000,000 items each year. 

Amy's Kitchen has grown, but our mission has never changed.....to provide delicious, organic, vegetarian prepared meals for people who appreciate good food but are often too busy to cook. And, yes, Amy's is still a family business, making these meals in our own plant under close family supervision.

Amy's products are sold in Natural food stores, supermarkets, independent grocery stores and club stores throughout the U.S. and Canada and in selected countries abroad. I you cannot find them, please contact us via email or telephone.

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2) Andy Berliner Speaks


ANDY BERLINER and his wife Rachel started Amy's Kitchen in Santa Rosa with the goal of filling a niche. Both "vegetarians and health food people," they found little of good quality offered in health food stores, so they decided to start their own line of vegetarian food. Finding that it was possible to use organic vegetables and grains to make convenience foods, they decided to make a quality frozen line which was natural and not yet available. Rachel was pregnant at the time, emphasizing the fact that, as they got busier in their own lives, the Berliners had less time to cook. Convenience food which hadn't been important to them before was clearly going to become more and more prominent. Berliner had a background in the food industry, and they figured there were more people like them who would like to have real), good natural food without having to make it themselves. 

They chose vegetable pot pies as their first product, basing the product on one of the original frozen food favorites, Swanson's pot pies. "A lot of us grew up on those pies, and they had a sort of comfort concept in our minds," Berliner says. "But now having become And vegetarian and health-oriented, we couldn't even think of eating that product." The Berliners noted that health food stores were selling meat pot pies and decided that if they sold even half of the volume of the meat pies sold, they'd be doing well.

The initial vegetable pot pie sold the equivalent of the existing turkey, chicken and beef pot pies four times over. Sales were close to home initially, but within c(Still months, the pies were in health food stores across the country. "After six months of having the vegetable pot pie on the market, people thought that Amy's had been around for years " Berlmer says. The vegetable pies became a staple, and their demand triggered between two and six new products per year, all snapped up by recently established distribution channels. Since 1988 and the birth of the Berliners> daughter Amy, the company has grown 30 to 40 percent almost every year.

The Berliners' products now include a variety of foods with options for dairy and non-dairy: pocket sandwiches, stir-fries, enchiladas with rice and beans, vegetarian salisbury steak with vegetables, lasagne, macaroni and cheese, ravioli, tomale pie, shepherd's pie, burritos, pizzas, veggie burgers, country pie and apple pie.

"What I didn't realize when we first started was that nobody else was making frozen convenience meals for health food stores," Berliner says. His competitors went to large frozen food manufacturer and asked them to make healthful products for them. "It is far different when you make the product yourself; you can control the quality and fine tune the product," Berliner says. Amy’s has made a huge jump in the quality of its product, which Berliner believes is part of the company's success aside from the fact that they're natural or vegetarian. 

Consumers have the reassurance that any Amy’s product is manufactured by a company dedicated to vegetarian food on production lines that are never used for meat products. Amy's growth has been without falter. The first fiscal year lasted three months and yielded $80,000. The next year, revenues climbed to $800,000 and then quickly reached $2 million. For the fiscal year starting July 2000, the Berliners expect more than $60 million in sales. Their plant makes 3.6 million meals per month and close to 50 million individual meals a year.

AC Nielsen ranks Amy's as number one of the top five brands of natural foods sold among mainstream supermarket frozen entrees, pizzas and convenience foods with 71 percent dollar share-seven times greater than the number two brand and up 30 percent from last year. Amy's contributed 83 percent of the dollar growth of that category last year, manufacturing 19 of the top-selling 20 items in he category. In health food stores the percentages are smaller because the freezer sections are much bigger. "Even in stores with huge freezers we have a really dominant share " Berliner says. 

Amy's is number one in the category that includes frozen entrees, pizzas and convenience foods plus others, with a 39.6 percent b-hare of all the prepared health foods sold across the country, up 3 percent from the year before. "I felt for sure we would drop or stabilize because there's so much competition coming in, but we actually grew 3 percent," Berliner says. Amy's contributes 63 percent to category growth in health food stores. In handheld convenience foods such as burritos and pockets, Amy's has a 41 percent share, almost up 7 share points July 2000, the Berliners expect more than $60 million in sales. Their plant makes 3.6 million meals per month and close to 50 million individual meals a year. AC Nielsen ranks Amy's as number one of the top five brands of natural foods sold among mainstream supermarket frozen entrees, pizzas and convenience foods with 71 percent dollar share-seven times greater than the number two brand and up 30 percent from last year. Amy's contributed 83 percent of the dollar growth of that category last year, manufacturing 19 of the top-selling 20 items in the category. In health food stores the percentages are smaller because the freezer sections are much bigger.

 "Even in stores with huge freezers we have a really dominant share" Berliner says. Amy's is number one in the category that includes frozen entrees, pizzas and convenience foods plus others, with a 39.6 percent b-hare of all the prepared health foods sold across the country, up 3 percent from the year before. "I felt for sure we would drop or stabilize because there's so much competition coming in, but we actually grew 3 percent," Berliner says. Amy's contributes 63 percent to category growth in health food stores. In handheld convenience foods such as burritos and pockets, Amy's has a 41 percent share, almost up 7 share points from a year ago. In the prepared meals category, Amy's has a 54 percent share, up 2.5 percent from last year.

Having started making pizzas about three years ago, Amy's already has a 45.5 percent share of that category. "Last year, we had five pizzas all in the top five-even our soy cheese pizza, which is non-dairy, outsells the next , Berliner says. "It all closest pizza comes from the quality. "Still there's a tremendous number of people who haven't discovered Amy's yet," Berliner says. "There's a long way for the company to grow." People in the health food market are very aware of Amy's, which accounts for over half the sales in some categories in health food stores. In grocery stores, it's a much smaller percentage. "There's a lot of people out there who want good quality foods and who would like to eat healthier foods who haven't discovered us," Berliner says. "We've got to figure out how to do that."

A new line of Amy's canned products was launched last summer. "We'd been looking for )'ears to expand on the Amy's brand name, which is strong in health food stores, yet we wanted to get outside of the frozen area " Berlner says. "We learned a little about canning, tasted all of the soups available in the health food stores and discovered there could be a tremendous quality gain." After some research, Amy's decided it could improve on what was currently offered.

(from Sonoma Business September 2000)

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3) In the News & Magazines

amy-magazine.gif (93258 バイト)Amy's Kitchen
appeared in many magazines
and newspapers


Food Processing Magazine - August 1996
The cooks in Amy's Kitchen could make even a diehard meat eater want to turn vegetarian.

Cooks Magazine - Winter 1997
The Crust, described by one taster as "just right, crispy chewwy," was a key factor in the pizzas high marks.

San Jose Mercury News
Indeed, the market for vegetarian-an alternatives to meat and dairy produtcts like these has exploded so much that sales rose from $138 million in 1989 to $286 million in 1994 according to Pckaged Facts. Amy's Organic Frozen Meals of Santa Rosa was one of the benefactors of that surge.

Allure Magazine - November 1996
It's only natural. "The first product we introduced was our Vegetable Pot Pie, for everybody who has grown up with Swanson." says Andy Berliner, president of Amy's Kitchen.

Food and Wine - Feb. 19, 1997
Amy's Kitchen passed our taste test, winning praise from vegetarians and meat-eaters.

New Woman Magazine - March 1997
Revival of TV Dinner: Frozen dinners are fast, easy, and can be nutricious too. Of the dinners that New Woman sampled here are the top five: -Amy's Vegetable Lasagna, -Amy's Country Dinner, -Amy's Enchilada

The Atlanta Journal(Food) - April 24, 1997
Amy's frozen foods wins thumbs up for flavor. The boxes of Amy's Kitchen frozen foods look like the other company boxes. The difference is that Amy's really is delicious. And it really is vegetarian.

Seventeen Magazine - October 1997
Amy's Roasted Vegetable Pizza is cheese-free, but it has the softest crust(not soggy like frozen pizzas) and is loaded with shiitake mushrooms, sweet onions and roasted red pepper. If you miss the gooey toppings, try Amy's spinach pie or organiz pizza pockets.

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4) Natural Food Market

Do you know where your natural food 
sales are coming from?

Frozen is the fast growing natural food category and Amy's is the largest and the fastest growing brand in the category.


So, if Amy's is more than 70% of natural frozen sales...
Shouldn't more of your freezer be Amy's? 

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5) A Product List

 

This part is under construction.

 


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