We were lucky to catch up with LeeAnn Zubay recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, LeeAnn thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?
My husband has been integral to the restaurant scene here in Rochester since 1978. I went along for the ride, always preaching the food and flavor have to come first, and that menus change like fashion. Get that lava cake off the menu before Pizza Hut adds it to theirs! I think I helped change that in our businesses. That gave our restaurants the reputation of being on the cutting edge. Later on my own, I brought quality food items to the marketplace long before any local grocery store uttered the word charcuterie. It is also very important to me, besides eating well. to have fun and laugh, a lot. So I hope people remember that. To sum it up I wrote a manifesto with the help of my daughter. This is my favorite line. “Justice and bats are blind, but your taste buds don’t have to be.”
LeeAnn, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’ve been thinking, eating, and talking about food for a helluva a long time. In 2008 my husband began to think about early retirement. I decided I wanted to try my hand at something. He could be the owner’s husband. I had put my time in as the owner’s wife.
So in 2009, with his help, I opened up ZZest Market. During its glory days, I was like a pig in shit. Every. Single. Solitary. Day. was delicious. I gained weight, knowledge, and recognition. It was addicting. I became certified as a cheese professional, which sounds lame, but the test to get the title was not. Think sommelier but cheese instead of wine. I won the Specialty Food Outstanding Retailer in 2011. I am pretty damn proud of both of those achievements. One puts letters behind my name, and the other looks like an Oscar.
You’ll soon see I am addicted to this industry and have changed things up over and over. The latest being Food Union. It is an e-commerce specialty food store (sound familiar?), focusing on gift boxes and specialty food subscription boxes. That’s the FOOD part of Food Union. The UNION part might be more important. It’s my blog, Midnight Smack. I want to share the stories of the people I have had the pleasure to work with. Many of them have gone on to their own food obsessions. I also deep dive into some of my fabulous products and remember our city’s long-ago food scene. I love it. It could be referred to it as a legacy project. Yikes, but I can’t turn back the clock; I am old-ish.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Ha! I pivoted a gazillion times.
To be fair, ZZest. Market and Cafe was doomed from the beginning. I thought it would be just a matter of time before everyone in our city of 100K would love food as much as I do. They would understand there are amazing products that are much more remarkable than their grocery store counterparts. Yes, this cheese, maybe $34 a lb, or olive oil could run as much as $42, but the flavor lingers; it’s not a cube of co-jack or a mass-produced bottle of olive oil.
One reason I believed I would prosper was when I opened ZZest Market, our city did not have a Trader Joe’s, Costco, or even a local Co-op. While I tried to gain ground with my specialty foods, all those places opened up. Trader Joe’s was basically next door, and my sales declined. Though my products were of better quality and small batch, I couldn’t compete with these stores’ equivalents with much lower prices.
On the cafe side of things, the chefs we hired were very talented. The menu became more sophisticated. So one big pivot was to close the market and focus on the cafe. But in the end, even the cafe was a struggle. Our location was chosen as a specialty food market (think strip shopping center), not a chef-inspired dining destination. It was a hard sell. We closed the cafe as well in 2017. In the space my family runs Hot Chip Burger Bar and it’s working out very well!
Next pivot; I went on to open a made-to-order salad space in a food court. Lettuce Unite. It was delicious, unique, and totally created by myself and one of the former ZZest chefs. But, in the end, covid took its toll. My lease was up, so we closed the business.
I felt defeated. I longed for all my beautiful cheeses and ZZest Market items. So, I basically rebranded ZZest Market into Food Union. It’s kind of like ZZest, only way smaller and in a hidden office, nobody knows about.
My goal isn’t to make money. I look at it as a hobby farm; I just need to make just enough money to pay my bills. I love being in my office/workspace. I literally obsess over the boxes and what goes in them. Like any new business owner, getting the word out there can be a struggle. Also, I run my business alone. But I love it. The biggest struggle is to control myself. I really want to grow this business. I’d love to add shipping and delivery and see where it can go. I keep reassessing and tweaking as I go. That pivoting stuff? It never ends.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
First, I have an easy last name to remember, Zubay, attached to over 40 years in the restaurant business (mostly successful), and we’ve been around a while.
Our fan base for ZZest Market and Cafe was very loyal. So when we decided to close in 2017, the final night of service was one of my most memorable nights. Our devoted customers came in for a last 6-course chef’s tasting. There was champagne, hugs, tears, and many good wishes! We had painted the bathrooms with black paint and allowed people to write on the walls in white marker. One little girl named Charolette wrote how she would miss ZZest. She was probably about 8 or so. Now, Charolette is in high school and works at Hot Chip!
To this day, I run into people telling me how much they miss ZZest. It is very humbling, and I treasure that every time it happens!
As Food Union. I see a lot of those past customers. Just today, I had a customer pick up a box to take it out of town. He told me he boasts to his friends that he has a personal cheese buyer that curates these boxes for him.
That’s the stuff that I live for!
Contact Info:
- Website: thisisfoodunion.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thisisfoodunion
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