Naples chef heats up Food Innovations The company is focusing on what it does best: locating rare foods and placing them in the hands of chefs around the country
By THERESA STAHL, tmstahl@naplesnews.com June 28, 2004
Joe DiMaggio Jr. can't fit rock stars into his schedule anymore.
He's cooked for U2, Aerosmith and The Cranberries, but the chef and business owner is pumping long days into a new venture that leaves no time for celebrities.
DiMaggio's company, Naples-based Food Innovations Inc., started shifting gears five years ago, moving from a restaurant design-and-concept company that catered on the side to a distributor of rare and specialty seafood, meats and produce for restaurants.
As a chef, DiMaggio had access to indigenous foods, and other chefs knew it. When they came up empty at local markets, they phoned DiMaggio to deliver origin-specific fare.
Food Innovations recently landed a major contract with one of the largest broadline food distributors in the United States. In March, Food Innovations went public to aid the company's growth, trading its stock on the over-the-counter Pink Sheets. The stock opened around 60 cents a share. On Friday, shares of the company, which trades under the symbol IVFH, closed at 35 cents.
Food Innovations was recruited to handle the exclusive perishables for U.S. Food Service, a $19 billion company whose main competition is Sysco. Food Innovations also formed a marketing and distribution agreement with Harvest Pak Foods Corp. in Fort Myers, a new industrial food processing company.
Meanwhile, the chef-driven company is concentrating on what it does best: plucking rare foods — from watermelon radishes to Baja scallops — off farms and boats and placing them in the hands of chefs at restaurants around the country.
Food Innovations handles 8,000 of the most exclusive perishables in the world, which means chefs can place an order for live sea urchins, blue fin tuna or leopard grouper, have it packed in gel ice in a FedEx box and arrive at their doorstep 24 hours later.
"It's pretty sexy to a chef, to be able to say that," said DiMaggio, 44, a distant relative of the baseball legend.
Fishermen e-mail Food Innovations from their boats with their catch at 4 a.m. every day. The company has secured 1,800 boats, 145 of which are in Florida. The fishermen filet the fish, box it and put it on a truck to be shipped directly to the restaurant. Thus, Food Innovations holds no inventory.
The seafood arrives so quickly some chefs are thrown off by the lack of a "fishy" smell, because fish served in most restaurants is usually a week old, DiMaggio said.
"With us, you open the box, you smell the ocean," he said.
DiMaggio says his company isn't hurting any local markets, because 85 to 90 percent of what Food Innovations sells isn't available locally.
Food Innovations also works with 300 farms and ranches that sell organic meats and game birds. Chefs can even choose what the animals eat and how they are killed.
Tony Newton, executive chef for The Dunes, a private club in North Naples, said when he has several months' notice for a catered event, such as a barbecue, he'll ask that baby lambs or goats be fed juniper berries and fresh sage "to enhance the flavor of the meat."
He has worked with Food Innovations for three years and says his success rate with the company has been near perfect.
"This is unbelievable product," Newton said. "When you can open a box and the fish is sitting there with hook and bait, nothing is going bad and you can use it in different ways because of the (long) shelf life."
Newton says the clientele at The Dunes is "millionaires and above" and DiMaggio says 75 percent of Food Innovations clients are premium white tablecloth restaurants, including hotels, country clubs and casinos. However, DiMaggio says he sells to mom-and-pops where the average check is $18.
When chefs call in to Food Innovations, they place orders with former executive chefs who handle the phones at their headquarters on Trade Center Way in North Naples. There, chefs who have bowed out of the kitchen use their expertise to fuel the creativity of restaurant chefs.
Food Innovations chefs can explain how to cook with the foods they sell, products many working the kitchens have never before seen.
"Chefs can speak eloquently to chefs," DiMaggio said. "We introduce (them) to a world they didn't have before."
Food Innovations also cuts down on research and ordering time for chefs, since they can purchase an array of products with one phone call, he said. Besides meat and seafood, the company sells produce, cheeses and chocolates.
Laura Brady, a Food Innovations chef who has worked in Atlanta, New York, West Palm Beach and locally at Bonita Bay, says the company's concept is rare.
"There's some companies that do similar things, but here everything is under a big umbrella," she said.
DiMaggio said next year he will more than double the number of his employees, adding 30 to the 22-person company, as he anticipates growth from the recent contracts.
The U.S. Food Service contract, signed in September, could help bring in up to $200 million in annual revenues, DiMaggio said. Food Innovations will be utilizing U.S. Food Service's network of 6,000 salespeople to grow their brand.
The Columbia, M.D.-based company is the exclusive national distributor for Food Innovations, according to Stephen Horan, vice president of sales and marketing for U.S. Food Service, which counts 150,000 independent restaurants as customers.
Horan said his company is excited about the multi-year contract because it will bring high-end products to chefs at U.S. Food Service's high-end restaurants.
The biggest advantage, he said, is that the product comes from the boat directly to the customer.
"So when that fish comes out of the water, it is packed and shipped FedEx and the next person that handles it is the chef," he said. "There's nobody else out there who does that."
Harvest Pak Foods, a new Fort Myers company, has hooked on to Food Innovations' network by way of a sales and distribution agreement to land their products in restaurants and hotels.
"They have a tremendous customer base with the target market we're going after," said Jeffrey Rinz, president and owner of Harvest Pak.
Harvest Pak packages non-perishable foods, such as soups, salsas and smoothie blends, into ready-to-eat pouches that have a shelf life of up to three years with no refrigeration. Manufactured in a food processing plant adjacent to Southwest Florida International Airport, Harvest Pak Foods are designed to help restaurants, hotels and airlines cut down on shelf space and refrigeration costs.
DiMaggio built the network with fishermen, farms and restaurants that other companies want to utilize. The company was given to him in 1991 after he earned accolades designing restaurants for it since he graduated from culinary school from Nice, France, in 1979.
Growing up, DiMaggio was tossed between New York and Italy. He moved to Naples in 1986, traveling extensively to cook for celebrities. He has lived in stints in other parts of the world before settling down here the last couple years.
DiMaggio's résumé reflects A-listers, restaurant risks and his jet-setting nature.
He was personal chef to Frank Sinatra in 1982. He's cooked on movie sets for Al Pacino, Richard Gere and Steven Segal and on tours for Chris Isaak and The Cranberries. From 1993 to '98 he was spokesman for the Florida Department of Citrus, showing people how to use citrus in cooking in places all over the world, including London, Austria and Japan. In 1994, DiMaggio founded a Toronto restaurant called Wet Paint Café that employed full-time artists and allowed customers to buy the tables.
Numerous articles in newspapers and culinary magazines document his adventures, with headlines playing off his name — "DiMaggio hits a home run" and "A style all his own at the plate." He's friends with Joe Amendola, former president of the Culinary Institute of America, who is an ambassador for Food Innovations.
DiMaggio switched Food Innovations to a perishables distributor after developing relationships with farms, ranches and artisan growers all over the country. He saw potential for the business when chefs kept calling him to locate products.
"Then we saw a need, a niche for this," he said.
Today DiMaggio turns over requests for the old business, mostly restaurant designing, to Creative Culinary Design, a California company with which he has a finders fee arrangement.
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