Charcuterie Can Capitalize on Demands for Affordable Indulgence, Unique Experiences

Tripician: Sure, sure. So, yeah, I took over as CEO of Charcuterie Artisans, which is really just a holding company for two well-known brands of charcuterie in the U.S., one being Daniele out in Rhode Island and the other one being Creminelli in Salt Lake. You know, kind of those family-founded companies — Daniele’s 50th anniversary is in ’26, and Creminelli’s is at two decades.

And so what made me make the change is that I wanted — as you know — I really wanted to try international and wanted to see if I could be part of a solution for a planet that's growing faster than we can supply all the food. I did that for about a year and a half with Meatable, and the U.S. has put up some roadblocks for cultivated meat. So it meant all of my travel was to Asia, Europe. It was nice to do international, learned a lot, but realized that that amount of travel exceeded what I wanted to do. And the fact that I knew nothing about science — which I thought would be OK because we had 86 scientists and I knew a lot about the U.S. industry, U.S. market and its application here, I figured it would be fine. But when the U.S. didn't really make itself available and everything was China and Thailand and Korea and so on, I realized I wasn’t the best guy to do that.

At the same time, this opportunity came up. I was a vendor to Creminelli with the Coleman business, and I was a customer to the Daniele business with Niman Ranch. So when they called, I said, not only do I know the space, but I know those businesses, I know the families, I know Cristiano, I know the Dukceviches. And so it was very easy and comfortable for me to slide in and help them immediately, and it was seamless.

Hanacek: So give the listeners a little bit of background on the company as you know it. You know, they acquired Creminelli and Daniele …

Tripician: Absolutely. So the two companies came together in 2019. They were purchased by private equity. Private equity struggled to integrate them, struggled to support them — in all the ways you’d expect support to materialize — financially, with managerial assistance, with all the things that when you put companies together you think would be part of that. And so they struggled. They struggled to be good to their customers, to be good to their vendors. Innovation suffered. And to the testament of the customers that were with both Daniele and Creminelli, they stayed with them. And I’m not sure I would have if I was still running the Perdue specialty meats company.

So I got part of a private equity team that bought out both companies. That was in early September. And in a little over two months, the team has galvanized. I’ve met with a dozen or so customers, reinvigorated their interest.

Because I’ll tell you a tiny bit about both organizations: Daniele is a significant production facility — about 550,000 square feet with a significant amount of excess capacity, the most in the U.S. — and a very broad spectrum of products from whole muscle to salami to prosciutto to cooked products. Full spectrum. And then on the other side, Creminelli: boutique, handcrafted, much smaller plant in Salt Lake; but it’s truly the artisan, 400-year-old recipes from Italy.

So between the two, you put them together in one enterprise, and if you are a customer and we don’t do it or can’t do it, then it probably shouldn’t be done. Because those two can get anything done in charcuterie. And if you're a consumer, they have multiple brands. We do private label, we do co-manufactured, and we have the Del Duca, Daniele and Creminelli brands. So we have multiple tiers for any degree of sophistication of a palate or any pocketbook. It’s really one-stop shopping for charcuterie in the U.S.

Hanacek: So why charcuterie — and why now? What’s driving growth that really makes it an attractive opportunity for you and, frankly, for Creminelli and Daniele?

Tripician: You know, I don’t think there’s too many new things. I think things just get applied to different businesses, and so it’s charcuterie’s time. I mean, it’s a very old industry. But in the U.S., the light bulb has kind of gone on.

Here’s how I classify it, and I’ll dig into it with you. There’s this affordable indulgence. We've seen it with fancy coffee, fancy chocolate, different categories. It's their moment. And I’ve watched charcuterie — which years ago, not very many years ago, I couldn’t say it, much less spell it — and today you can go to Salt Lake City, you can go to markets that wouldn’t have normally been the New Yorks and the LAs and San Franciscos and Chicagos. You can go across the country and you find these groups of consumers that have that deep passion for food. I mean, just watch any television: tons of shows about food.

And charcuterie — dried salamis, fermented product, product that’s a little bit above maybe what we grew up with and in flavors that are global — it’s convenient in packaging and slicing, convenient in dicing for adding to recipes. It is the affordable upgrade now in the culinary world. I was just with a customer last night here in Salt Lake City, and they said, “We didn’t have any of these products in our grocery stores 15 years ago.” And today the specialty cheese section and charcuterie together are driving younger consumers as they experiment with different culinary adventures. And the person’s talking with a twinkle in their eye — you could see it, you could hear it.

So I think charcuterie is at that moment. Whether it’s convenience for things like pre-sliced, or the discovery in the variety packs that can have anything from two up to five or six different elements that you can use and pick what you like — fruits, chocolate, nuts, cheese, crackers, and obviously the meat. Or on-the-go: You can go to a convenience store or a drugstore and get a small snack pack that fits your lifestyle. That wasn’t true a decade ago.

And there’s also this sense of comfort. Some people have a history with this product, but there’s this permission to indulge — for a reasonable amount of money, someone can experiment with their journey down food in a way that, a thousand years ago in Italy and Spain, people were doing the same thing. It’s just new here. Global flavors — just like in coffee and spices — are happening in charcuterie today. It’s exploding. Growth is significant in flavors, in variety packs, in single-serve snack packs — all double-digit numbers.

Hanacek: You mentioned the indulgence — the permissible, affordable indulgence. And you talked about the penetration into even C-stores, where it’s a snackable item. So I assume charcuterie just fits into a lot of these places. But what are consumers expecting from charcuterie at this point? Is it still a very wide, varied audience, or are there some real trends that you guys are going to be trying to take advantage of — without giving away the kitchen sink, of course?

Tripician: Sure. Yeah. So I think that’s a lot, and I'll try to unpack a couple of those things. One is — and again, I’m just leaning on a conversation I had last night with a grocer — they said, look, there’s a schism or a break between old and new. And old is relatively lower quality. It's old, it's what we would have called salami and things like that. It’s average pepperoni, average lunch meat. It’s the old deli from years ago. And that’s still there, in a different aisle, in a different section.

And then there’s new, and that would have been specialty. That’s connected to the service deli, to the cheese shop concept in a store. Charcuterie is an accompaniment — they go hand in glove. And 10 years ago, that didn’t exist except maybe at a Whole Foods.

So what changed? Consumers’ interest in that food journey. Now there are more TV shows about cooking, ingredients, authenticity. That’s a topic today. And it’s increasing.

So that break — the much higher quality, more authentic, curated product — that’s the part that’s growing dramatically. The lower-end product is fine; it’s got a lower price point, old brands, old formulas. But the growth is coming from the specialty new flavors, new varieties, new formats, personal sizes you can get in two ounces and eat on the run. Things like that just didn’t exist.

I think that’ll continue. It’ll take the normal course, where it’ll get to individual size, more portable and more claims — which largely don’t exist. In the fresh meat case, tons of claims. In charcuterie, where are the claims? Where are the breeds? Where’s humane treatment? Sustainability? Flavors of origin — European, northern, southern, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern? That’s the next wave of proliferation.

And somewhere along the line, nutritional claims will become an issue, which doesn’t largely exist today. Someone will say, “Is there a healthier version, and what do you trade off for that?” That’s the domain that’s going to ramp up very quickly.

We’re going to have products stratified not just by brand but by meaningful claims that consumers want. If you want a healthier line, we’ll have one, whether that’s sodium, fat, or some other health claim. If you’re interested in humane treatment, we’ll have verified claims so people have confidence. If you’re on the journey of global flavors from the old world and new world, we’ll have that too.

All of that we’ll be bringing to market in about a year.

Hanacek: So yeah, that is cool. And it’s cool to hear — I was going to ask, but you kind of already answered — is there a world in which specifying that these are Middle Eastern flavors, or built off Indian cuisine, or a Japanese-inspired salami, could work? And it sounds like yeah, that’s kind of the future, right?

Tripician: Absolutely. I mean, I’ll tell you what we’re doing, because I’m not smart enough to do this without the experts — I’m only smart enough to know I need help. So for example, one of the first things I did was bring Cristiano Creminelli back. Every week, every Friday, he spends time with our team on product innovation. He has free reign from Italy to explore what the future of charcuterie should be in the U.S., in his opinion. Once a month, he meets with our key customers to talk about how we should be the first ones to the future.

So end of January, he’s meeting with six of our core customers a day to talk about the future and how he can help them get there first. And we have the plants to make it. So we’re taking his vision of the future, adding a customer, putting it into our plant, and saying, “We can make that for you in weeks or months.”

Hanacek: So that leads me to the next question, which is: Covering charcuterie over the last decade, it feels like the big innovations were more along the lines of, “hey, here’s your meat and cheese board,” or “try this cheese with this meat,” or “bring in olives, fruits, crackers.” But now it sounds like it’s time for the meats to step up and take the next step.

Tripician: Yeah, it has to keep pace. It can’t just be that you innovate around it; you have to innovate it. But here’s the potential.

You’re a customer running a grocery store chain or foodservice, and you go, “I know my market. I want prosciutto, but I want it flavored this way. I want it to have this sense of, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t know it could taste like that.’” And we go, “Great, what other attributes?” Maybe you have an opinion, maybe you don’t.

Then we say, “OK, what about the cheese? And the cracker?” And you say, “I have a local cracker that’s phenomenal.” Great. “Who are they? We’ll contact them.” Then you say, “I have a local cheese guy. A local chocolate maker.” And we can customize it.

Why would we think barbecue sauce can be regionalized, beer can be regionalized, but charcuterie should have one answer? It doesn’t.

So the ability to sit with a company in Seattle or Charlotte or Boston or L.A. and say, “What’s unique in your market that we can include?” We’ve started that, and it has hit a chord with people. Because now they can have something unique. Not a national answer.

So back to your charcuterie board: we can provide meat with different attributes and flavors. You tell us what’s local that you love, and we’ll include it, under our name or yours. There need to be production minimums, but otherwise, that degree of customization has really grabbed customers’ attention. And now they should expect it. They demanded customization in other sections — it’s time for charcuterie to do that.

Hanacek: Yeah. That regionalization is really interesting. Good examples too — barbecue sauce, beer. Which, all of that you can incorporate into charcuterie.

I remember, here on the northwest side of Chicago in a relatively blue-collar neighborhood, and they opened a brewery. I told the owners, “This is kind of a Miller Lite, Coors Light, Bud Light neighborhood. I hope you guys do well, but you can’t just have all IPAs on the menu.” They put on a Kölsch, it did well. Then they started bringing in food, and I was surprised they put on a charcuterie board. I thought it was somewhat out of place for the neighborhood. But I talked to the owner months or a year later — that charcuterie board was one of their best sellers. That’s awesome. So I can only imagine if they regionalized it or brought in neighborhood contributions to that board, how much more popular it’d be.

Tripician: Well, to me, that’s the domain of the specialty side — not the basics, the specialty. So using your example, imagine sitting down with that brewer and saying, “OK, you’ve got the charcuterie board. Let’s talk about the pieces — meat, cheese, chocolate, fruit, olives, crackers. Is there something local that’s well known in your area that we should include in that board?” And they go, “Oh my gosh, yes — there’s a local ___.” That’s what we’re doing.

We’ll have five or six examples we can suggest, but that doesn’t mean they’re right for you. You tell us. That has hit a chord with customers, because everyone wants something unique. We’re not giving them a national answer; we’re letting them customize. That’s the future — for specialty grocers, regional grocers, regional foodservice or anyone who says, “I might not be the biggest, but I have a very passionate clientele.” That’s the only qualification: passionate clientele.

Hanacek: Shift gears a little. We’re here in late November, early December. Holidays are coming up. This is kind of the party tray time of year where you have your holiday parties. Although none of us work in an office anymore, so those are fewer and farther between, but still gatherings. Party trays are a big deal. Is there seasonality to them? And if so, how do you break out of that?

Tripician: First, yes, they are seasonal. They’re tied to events, and unless we come up with new events, that’s true.

So you have to look at the contents and ask: are we trying to take the same contents and say that’s what you should have in the middle of summer at a picnic as you would have for a New Year’s Eve party or Christmas party or Thanksgiving or Easter? And the reality is no, of course it’s different. A picnic should be lighter, maybe less robust.

Flavors can do that. So can the actual meat — some have more robust, heavy flavor; others don’t. So having trays or snack packs or individual sizes reflect the season makes sense. We have summer beer and winter ale, why would charcuterie feature the same product answer regardless of temperature or activity?

That’s where it needs to mature. We shouldn’t have one size fits all. We don’t in other categories. And it’s not just flavor. There’s a part of the consumer base — I’ll talk about an older one for a second — that sees this product on the “do not consume” list by a lot of the health industry. “It’s meat, it’s high in fat,” etc. But what if it wasn’t? What if the sodium was dramatically reduced? What if the fat content was dramatically reduced? What if you cracked the code?

You take a group with more disposable income that grew up with this product and now can’t have it. You go, the heck you can’t — now you can.

That’s where innovation has to live. Convenience and portability for some, seasonality for some, nutritional content for some. And some say, “I want to make sure you're treating the animals right and the land right.” Fine. Products have to address those things. Not in the sense of one item will do it all — there need to be different brands and products that target different pockets of consumers.

Then you turn to the grocery, foodservice, drug or C-store and say, “I think this one fits your clientele. What do you think?” That’s what I was doing last night, and at the end, they said, “We’ll innovate with you.” And I said, “We’ll be your partner. Our plant is your plant.” And the person had that look — like, “I think you actually mean that.”

And I said, “I actually mean that. You come out, let’s look at it, we’ll figure out what you want. And if we can do it, we’re doing it.”

Editor's Note: This summarized transcript was compiled and lightly edited using AI software, then proofed and edited by a human editorial staff member.