Make Your Own Mac-N-Cheese
Is "make your own" a new
trend?
Two new establishments in the
San Francisco Bay area allow you to make your own wine. You may know places
that allow you to put your own LABEL on their wine. But these new places go
much further. They let you choose not only the grape varietals, but also which
vineyards the actual grapes came from! They let you make all the appropriate
winemaker-type decisions: should it be aged in oak? How long? Malolactic
fermentation or
not?
Bacchus
Winemaking Club and Crushpad offer varying levels of professional guidance
during the process. Still, this is not for the recent white zinfandel convert.
A “batch” of wine costs upwards of $1000 and results in more wine
that you can drink in a season. It’s more wine than I can drink in a
season and I’m quite prolific! Yet I believe this indicates a nascent
tactic to convert “mass customization” into “make it yourself
in small
batches.”
Imagine
you are entertaining friends for dinner. They rave about your pappardelle in
rabbit ragu: a hearty bowl of hand-cut pasta ribbons topped with braised rabbit
meat in a rich red wine sauce. You tell them you made it yourself: but not at
home. The gourmet goodies you are cooking came from the new Pasta Myselfa, an
establishment where Italian food fans can go bottle their own pasta sauces, cure
their own prosciutto, and make their own agnolotti pasta in small, home
kitchen-size batches. I’m making this up, of course, but is it really
that much of a
stretch?
And why stop
at the high end of the culinary food chain? Why couldn’t you make your
own cola? Frozen pizza? Ice cream? Mac-n-cheese?! There’s no reason
you couldn’t mix up a small batch of any category of food.
The question is what
type of companies will offer this service to consumers. Will unique,
independent establishments (like Crushpad and Bacchus) spring up to cash in on
this trend? Will restaurants start offering the service? Or…perhaps your
company can somehow cash in on this “make it yourself” trend. Just
how customized can consumers make your products? Perhaps it’s time to
start crushing the status quo…
Jesse Pearson
and Barbara Gratta, both of San Francisco, sort Zinfandel grapes at the Crushpad
facility, where customers can be as hands-off or hands-on as they like.
San Francisco Chronicle photo by Darryl Bush.
Posted: Mon - March 21, 2005 at 09:43 PM