It used to be, back in the

not-so-distant days when the gourmet and specialty food industry was in its infancy, that a German had to travel to Nuremberg to taste a Lebkuchen cookie, a Czech had to go to Karlovy Vary to get his hands on a sheeps’ milk Abertam and an American had to go to a small town in Toombs County, Georgia to find a Vidalia onion.
Locating foods from farther afield was even more difficult. Where I grew up, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my supermarket’s ethnic food section consisted of the occasional Chinese noodle, some soy sauce and a few boxes of El Paso taco shells.

What a difference a few years make. In the US alone, nearly 20% of the adult population are now gourmet food consumers, fueling a market expected to reach $62 billion by 2009. How many Greek products, I wonder, will be a part of this market?

Because, until very, very recently, if a Greek wanted to find Santorini yellow split peas, Loukoumia candy from Siros or Elitses olives from Crete, well, his best bet was to book a ferry ticket out of the port of Piraeus. Even today, it is a rare Greek supermarket that stocks such regional delicacies. Instead they may be found in a few (recently opened) gourmet food stores located in major urban centers. And, if such products are hard to find in Greece, imagine how hard they are to find outside of the country.

They don’t have to be. It may actually be easier for quality Greek food manufacturers to export their products rather than placing them locally. The supermarket infrastructure in Greece, with a few exceptions, is controlled by multinationals. Gone are the mom and pop shops, replaced by stores featuring aisles filled with brands like Kraft and Dole. This, coupled with Greek supermarkets’ Byzantine purchasing practices, means that truly extraordinary Greek products have a hard time finding shelf space in Greece’s markets. Their only chance, I believe, is to find shelf space in countries more amenable to gourmet goods.

What sort of gourmet goods? Extra virgin, first cold pressed olive oils from a variety of cultivars, wild flower honey, saffron, spices, spoon sweets, cured fish, pressed caviar, artisan cheeses, preserved vegetables – the list can go on. Not only are the products exceptional, but there is a new breed of company emerging in Greece – companies that care about quality, that wish to preserve tradition, that make things that are truly unique. Many of them are young companies, true, and may not supply the sort of polished performance provided by larger, more established concerns. But they are eager and passionate about what they do and they can learn.

For these companies, as well as for similar companies in other less industrialized states – like Turkey, Bulgaria and Hungary – the specialty food market that flourishes in the US, parts of the EU, Japan, etc., may offer the best hope for the viability of their products. In fact, it may be their last line of defense. Without the support of this market, many delicious products will become extinct.

The specialty food market is already under pressure from multinationals. Organic doesn’t mean what it used to, thanks to these concerns. They often co-opt regional specialties, turning them into a highly-processed facsimile of their former glory. Athenos feta (owned by Kraft), which is produced in Wisconsin, is not Feta at all, but it none-the-less bears the name and turns a profit.

True gourmet products are often the purview of smaller companies. They make them with love. And consumers of gourmet products just may love to buy them.

Last Line of Defense:
The Specialty Food Market