Klavon spices up grab-and-go sector with international flair

Nation's Restaurant News,  Nov 19, 2007  by Andy Battaglia

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After working in foodservice both on the ground and in the air, Kulsoom L. Klavon took on another frontier--the convenience store segment. She was born in Karachi, Pakistan, to a Pakistani mother and an "all-American" father from Cleveland, and her upbringing included stints living in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

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Klavon's first significant foodservice job was in product development at American Airlines, and from there she went on to work for Carlson Restaurants as the director of research and development for T.G.I. Friday's. In 2003 she left, with some reluctance, to oversee food programs for the more than 30,000 units that make up the convenience store chain 7-Eleven.

How did your interest in food grow out of your upbringing?

It really developed by virtue of the fact that I spent so much time growing up all over the world, so I got substantial exposure to the cuisines and spices and cooking techniques of so many different cultures. As a kid, I was fascinated by different languages, tastes and flavors, and at an early age I developed an overall curiosity for experiencing the "authentic."

Which one place left the biggest imprint on you?

It's sort of a toss-up. 1 was born in Pakistan and grew up there, and that I had a significant impact on me, mostly by way of their use of spices. It was never about the use of salt and fats and creams and so on that you see so much in this culture and in European cultures. It was really about bringing flavor to a dish with different spice-blends that bring food to life.

You've worked in a number of jobs outside traditional restaurant scenarios. Was that a conscious choice?

It was. When I went to American Airlines is when I got a real sense that I could be in the food business without having to be a classically trained chef. I'm self-taught, but I'm still in a position to be able to work with food and be creative with it. From there I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do. It's given me an opportunity to have a much more holistic perspective. I'm not just thinking about ingredients or flavors, but I'm thinking about the whole context of a product from a consumer's perspective.

What made you want to move to 7-Eleven?

Initially I debated the change because I really wanted to be around food and flavors and stay on top of trends, and quite frankly, I wondered if I'd be able to do that at a convenience store chain. What convinced me was the fact that I would have a chance to learn more about food, in terms of retail and packaging, in a chain that has tremendous presence and scale. It was a chance to have an impact on a business that was in its incipience.

What did you most want to change about how people think of 7-Eleven?

At the time I joined, there was just no consumer awareness or credibility from a fresh-foods standpoint. One of the first things I did was build a test kitchen and establish a team of product development chefs following the classic model that you see in the rest of the food industry. From there, the objective was to determine what the biggest strategic opportunities were to leverage our advantages. One of those obviously happens to be convenience, so if we can determine how best to sell fresh-food products, we're going to do well because we're already habitual for customers. They come to us in the morning for coffee, and then again at the end of the day for various other things. So it's a question of tapping into that by putting some other products into the mix.

What was your first breakthrough offering?

One of the first things I did was to focus on different kinds of breads and using them as a carrier for some interesting sandwich-based platforms. At the time, 7-Eleven was just doing wheat and white bread, but we branched out into ciabatta breads, flat breads, tortillas, wraps, focaccia, so many different things. It was a matter of expanding the scope of our offerings and leveraging some things that were very much on-trend and in demand.

What was a unique test kitchen idea that worked?

We've tossed about a lot of crazy ideas and tested a number of them. But because our customers are so frequent, our product life cycles are relatively short. We have some customers coming in every day of the week, so menu fatigue is very significant, unlike in restaurant chains, where you see it but not every day. One idea that worked was a pizza sandwich. We developed a flat bread that had cheese on it, pepperoni, and proprietary tomato paste, only on one side. They looked like a wedge of pizza, but they were cold sandwiches.

What was something that just didn't work?

We've dabbled in home meal replacement, but that just hasn't met with much success. We still have so much opportunity to continue to gain awareness and credibility in a lot of the basics-sandwiches, salads, fruit snacks--that venturing even slightly outside the bull's-eye probably doesn't make sense in the near-term. We're a convenience-store chain, so people are popping in typically for single-serve items. Home meal replacement would require a conscious effort to be in the consumer's mind as a destination for food to pick up to take home.