Feeding the world: Jan Risi's mission to find the best and safest food sources takes her to far-flung Morocco, the South Pacific and even the Florida heartland

South Florida CEO,  Oct, 2004  by J.P. Faber

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Immokalee, Fla., is like many of the small towns Jan Risi has visited during her career as a food buyer. It has a John Deere tractor outlet, produce stands, and clapboard homes in need of fresh paint. Mexican migrants ply the fields of the town's surrounding farms, and pinata stores and an Aztec Super Center have sprung up nearby to serve them.

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"We have a lot of people to feed in this country, and we are very efficient feeders," says Risi, who has come to visit one of the main produce suppliers for the Subway chain of sandwich shops. "It takes communities like this to do it."

Risi is the 44-year-old CEO of Miami-based Independent Purchasing Cooperative, the exclusive supplier of food for Subway restaurants. Every year she oversees the purchase of $2 billion worth of food for the chain's 19,000 franchise outlets in the US. The job is a balancing act that splits her time between searching for the best quality at the lowest cost while also emphasizing food safety, she says.

To be sure, it was cost savings that prompted a group of Subway franchisees to ask her to start a company-wide food-buying cooperative eight years ago. Cooperatives combine the buying power of their members, and were popularized by citizen groups during the 1960s counter-culture movement, but now they are increasingly common in the quick service restaurant industry. Risi, with years of experience as a buyer, says that ultimately it was food safety that drove franchisees to approve the formation of IPC.

"The franchisee perception was that we were taking away their right of who they could buy from," Risi recalls. "It was like, 'I use this guy who's local, who brings in these fresh, vine-ripe tomatoes every day. Now you're telling me that's bad for me, that I have to buy from this big company?'"

Hara Frankel, who owns two Subway shops in Miami, was one of those who opposed IPC at first, saying she felt she was being disloyal to her previous suppliers. "But I was amazed. They've saved us millions of dollars--[though] food safety is the most significant benefit to the franchisees."

A single case of food poisoning can ruin a restaurant, or at least tarnish its image, and it can have lasting affects on future revenue. That fear is part of what motivates the energetic Risi to hit the road six days out of ten. In Immokalee, in southwest Florida, she checks on the processing of tomatoes, green peppers, cucumbers and red onions, which are brought in for sorting, cleaning and packaging. She tours huge warehouses filled with mechanical mazes of chutes, ladders, water troughs and bins. On this tour, a flat conveyor belt moves a sea of tomatoes, while dozens of workers separate the good from the bad as the fruit heads to a sifting device that sorts them by size.

"The goal is a box of even-sized, even-colored fruit, so they are all usable," says Darren Paul Micelle, who runs this family-owned packing facility. "We're a manufacturer--I mean, these may as well be widgets."

But they are not, and the fact that the produce is destined for health-conscious US consumers prompts IPC to buy produce grown under strict guidelines--In this instance, the choice is Florida tomatoes, rather than cheaper Mexican imports.

Risi's buying expeditions do take her offshore, and often to exotic destinations such as Morocco, where IPC purchases black olives, and the South Pacific, where it procures tuna.

"I go down to Pago Pago in American Samoa [and] it's a remarkable experience," Risi says. "It's hot, Africa-hot, and on this little island in the Pacific there is an inland cove, where the processing takes place ... the women in the plants sing while they work. It's the most beautiful music you've ever heard."

The Samoan tuna is caught with dolphin-safe nets and immediately put on ice. Later it is steam-cooked and canned or put in pouches. "You are safer eating canned tuna than fresh tuna," Risi says. "It hasn't been sitting out."

To make sure that the food is up to standards, the North American Association of Subway Franchisees set up an office of food safety and quality, made up of IPC, Subway corporate and an independent food testing company, Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Cook & Thurber. Juelene Beck, CEO of the franchise association, says the office puts "together contracts with very tight specifications for the food, with all aspects of food safety in mind." Cook & Thurber then hires National Food Laboratories in Pleasonton, Calif., to test the food for things ranging from microbes and parasites to taste, texture and color.

"Subway has a good reputation for their food quality," says Laura Ries of the Atlanta-based restaurant marketing consulting firm Ries & Ries. Creating a food cooperative to standardize and control buying "is one way to keep that quality up. It's also a good branding strategy to make sure the quality is there."