By GREGORY ZELLER //
A Long Island yogurt maker with an ultra-healthy formula and an already-impressive following is close to joining an exclusive club.
Port Jefferson-based Trimona Foods has its metaphorical fingers crossed following a meeting with Sam’s Club, the membership-based retail warehouse chain owned and operated by Arkansas-based Walmart Inc.
Trimona, launched in 2008 by founder and “Chief Yogurt Officer” Atanas Valev, pitched it’s 32-ounce plain yogurt – “Traditional,” the company calls it – during Walmart’s 2021 Virtual Open Call event, held earlier this month. The pitch went well, and Trimona is slated to reconnect with Walmart buyers in September, essentially Round 2 of the selection process.
The Port Jefferson company boasts a Bulgarian background and fairly familiar origin story. Valev made his own yogurt at home for years using a “mother culture” he brought from Bulgaria in 1991; family and friends loved the stuff, prompting him to reach out to local farmer’s markets and health-food stores.
The yogurt took off. Commercial production followed. Flash forward a decade or so, and Trimona Bulgarian Yogurt is a multistate hit, gracing shelves at well-known supermarket chains across New York, New England, California and elsewhere.
Walmart, however, represents a whole new plateau for the 2008 startup, which is very excited about the prospect, Valev noted.
Atanas Valev: Bulgarian culture.
“It’s going to be a huge deal,” the founder told Innovate Long Island. “If we’re lucky, we’re going to get into select Walmart stores.”
That “select” caveat is key. Trimona, which announced in April that its yogurt would be produced exclusively with A2A2-tested milk, is geared toward a specific, health-conscious audience – so its presence in chains like Wild By Nature and Whole Foods Market makes marketing sense.
Walmart is a bit chancier, according to Valev.
“We’re not going to do well in every Walmart,” he noted. “We need a crowd that reads labels and is health-conscious.
“Every grocery chain has, like, A, B and C stores,” Valev added, and Trimona aims for the locations where shoppers are more apt to pay attention to ingredients and nutritional value.
“We like to use the word ‘select,’” he said.
Case in point: Trimona has a longstanding deal with Maine-based Hannaford Bros., proprietor of the Hannaford supermarket chain, which operates roughly 180 stores throughout New York and New England. But the Bulgarian yogurt is only available at about 25 of those stores.
The same for Trimona’s deal with Maine-based Shaw’s Supermarkets, which places the product in about 65 of its approximately 130 New England stores – completely by design, according to Valev.
“They have figured out that those locations will be profitable, based on the quality of our product,” he said. “It’s not a price-sensitive issue, but more about the makeup (of the shoppers).”
The Sam’s Club/Walmart buyers seem to get it. Trimona CEO Pavel Kolarov said in a statement that the buyers were “well-prepared” for the early-July pitch and had already “researched our company and brand extensively, which made for a very productive call.”
Milking it: Leonard Martin Farm in Pennsylvania Dutch Country is the exclusive supplier of Trimona Bulgarian Yogurt’s milk.
“They really liked us,” Valev seconded. “They gave us close to an hour’s time … for the size of our company, one hour from Walmart is a lot.”
Also promising: Walmart actually reached out to Trimona and invited the Port Jefferson company – which manufacturers through Pennsylvania-based co-packing company Penn Dairy and obtains its A2A2 milk exclusively from Leonard Martin Farm in Pennsylvania Dutch Country – to pitch at the 2021 Virtual Open Call.
Valev speculates that Trimona’s existing deals with Whole Foods, Wild By Nature and other large-scale chains – including Wegmans, Shoprite and others – caught Walmart’s attention.
However the Bulgarian yogurt found its way onto Walmart’s radar, the chief yogurt officer – also listed as the company’s “dairy and nutrition educator” and “engineer of tropical and subtropical agriculture” – and the rest of the Trimona crew are eagerly anticipating their late-summer second meeting.
“They reached out probably because we are unlike any other yogurt on the market,” he said. “A2A2 is a new trend. Beyond a trend, really – it’s something everybody should know about.
“I don’t know how many more stages we have to go through if we pass the second one,” he added. “But I would say (we’ll be in Walmart) in no longer than a year.
“It’s a lot of work, and a lot of education, which is my job … and it’s very exciting.”
