MODERN LIVING: Let Them Eat Pat

éMODERN LIVING

Seldom before had so many fancy foods been set before the gourmets and gourmands—eel from Canada, white asparagus from Belgium, kangaroo steak from Down Under, smoked Ostyepky sheep's-milk cheese from Czechoslovakia. The occasion was the fourth annual Fancy Food and Confection Show last week, and buyers marched into Manhattan's caviar-class Waldorf-Astoria to examine 20,000 food products—four times as many as last year.

Their enthusiasm was more commercial than epicurean. Sales of luxury foods in the U.S. have more than doubled since 1954, will pass $100 million this year. The boom is part of the new leisure, which has Americans doing more entertaining than ever at home, and with higher incomes to do it.

Birds & Bees. Last year Americans nibbled away $2,860,000 worth of Iranian and Russian sturgeon caviar, $1,000,000 worth of pâté de foie gras. Besides these two favorite standbys, last week's show brought out a cornucopia of new items. Chicago's Reese Finer Foods Inc. showed off a full pantry, from a $300 gift package of 60 items—Portuguese anchovies, Swiss candies, etc., stacked atop a barrel-based table—to 3½-oz. aerosol cans of cheese spread that sell for 59¢. For the brave and the bold, there were the birds (tinned Japanese sparrows) and the bees (fried and tinned), rattlesnake paté, fried silkworms and chocolate-covered ants.

One of the remarkable aspects of the boomlet is that it was inspired abroad, but has since become a plump domestic business. Four years ago, 99% of the fancy foods was imported; today 40% is made in the U.S. Home-grown companies are cashing in in a dozen different ways. Manhattan's gilt-edged Café Chambord has warmed its cash registers by freezing its delicacies for retail sale, offers a full French line, from single portions of sauce Périgourdine ($1.25) and pompano Véronique ($4.50), to complete dinners for eight at $100 (sea food au gratin, duck au Grand Marnier, soufflé au chocolat, etc.).

Bouillabaisse & Babas. The most ambitious new effort has come from billion-dollar General Foods Corp., which bit into the market last year with 53 packaged "gourmet" items, planning to sell them for prestige value alone. General Foods this year will add seven new luxuries, including bouillabaisse ($1.10), spiced Cherry Heering preserves ($1.25), Smithfield ham and cheese paté (70¢), babas au rhum ($1.10). Nestlé will now have a big finger in the luxury pie, recently signed to sell Switzerland's famed Hero line of preserves.

With the big-brand companies moving in, fancy foods are expected to crack into the resistance area where they now must grub for sales—the South, the Midwest (except Chicago) and small towns all over. Virtually all fancy-food sales are confined to big cities; 60% come within a 300-mile radius of Manhattan. But they are spreading fast. In the past few years, the number of U.S. specialty-food stores has doubled to 6,000, and there are another 6,000 gourmet corners in groceries, drug and department stores, supermarkets, etc. It is in the supermarkets that the greatest potential market is beginning to grow. Supermarkets, which usually work on a 16% to 20% markup and a 1.6% profit margin, are turning to the fancy foods because of the high markup, 30% to 40%.