Canned Tomatoes

Perhaps your recipe file, like mine, includes several dishes whose ingredients include cans of diced tomatoes.  I find myself buying canned tomatoes not infrequently at the grocery store.

Maybe your grocery store is also like mine in that the selection of canned diced tomatoes has burgeoned in recent years.

I do not speak of the many brands of diced tomatoes -- Del Monte, Pomi, Contadina, Eden Organic, Muir Glen, Heinz and the generic store brand -- that strain the shelves in the canned vegetable aisle.

Nor do I refer to stewed tomatoes, canned whole tomatoes, canned Roma tomatoes in sauce with basil, tomato sauce, tomato paste or tomato puree.

No no no.  My only concern is the regular 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes.

The problem is the wide variety of types of canned diced tomatoes.  Several times now I have come home and emptied my (canvas) grocery bag to find that I have bought the wrong type of canned diced tomatoes.

All who know me will attest that my cooking skills are limited.  I am not confident substituting different ingredients for those named in a recipe.  And I don't think I'm the only one.

Let me illustrate the complicated decision process facing the diced-tomato shopper with an illustration of the varieties of canned diced tomatoes offered by just one company.

Regular diced tomatoes

Diced tomatoes with no salt added

Petite diced tomatoes

Petite diced tomatoes with no salt added

Diced tomatoes in sauce

Spicy red pepper diced tomatoes

Rosemary and oregano diced tomatoes

Roasted garlic diced tomatoes

Sweet onion diced tomatoes

Basil, garlic & oregano diced tomatoes

Green pepper, celery & onion diced tomatoes

Basil, garlic & oregano diced tomatoes with no salt added

Fire roasted diced tomatoes

Fire roasted garlic diced tomatoes

Organic diced tomatoes (as opposed to synthetic ones, perhaps)

With the occasional exception of fire roasted diced tomatoes, I only buy plain diced tomatoes, and  I don't think I am unusual in this.  When I get to the long, long tomato aisle in the grocery store, the diced tomato selection has been picked over and the cans of plain diced tomatoes are mostly gone.  

Most of what is left are the "tomatoes with" varieties.  With oregano.  With garlic.  With celery.  With onion.   With dark chocolate.  (Okay, I added the last one.  But it definitely could happen.)

If recipes call for cans of plain diced tomatoes, why do canned goods companies go to the expense of setting up separate production lines for so many other varieties of the same product? 

Why do grocery stores stock so many varieties of the same product?  All the "with" items are available elsewhere in the same store, after all.  

Distributing, storing and restocking more products takes more storage space, shelf space and labor than distributing, storing and restocking fewer products.  

Trust me on this: I've studied business economics.  This diced tomato situation is a textbook case of an inefficient supermarket.

The Costco Chicken

Yesterday I did my monthly Costco run for coffee, fruit, yogurt and whatever else caught my eye.

As I walked out the door, the Significant Other yelled, "Remember to get a chicken!"

What he meant was one of those rotisserie chickens that Costco has been selling since 1995.  At our house, these are known as "roto-chickens."

After adding a roto-chicken to my cart, I hailed a Costco worker in the butcher department.

"How many of these do you sell every day?" I asked her.

"About 900," she said.

One store, one day -- 900 chickens!

Across the chain, I learned later, Costco sells 70,000 rotisserie chickens every day.  Annual sales of these just keep growing, from 50 million in 2011 to 80 million or more in 2015.

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There are at least two things people like about Costco chickens. 

First is taste.  The roto-chickens are delicious, lightly seasoned, moist on the inside and golden brown on the outside -- nothing like the stringy, dried-out birds found at most local supermarkets.

        One reason for this is that roto-chickens don't sit in the warming display for too long.  Store employees pull chickens that haven't sold after two hours; the leftovers are chilled and then used in other Costco products:  rotisserie chicken soup, rotisserie chicken salad and rotisserie chicken Alfredo.  

Second is price.  At $4.99 apiece, the chickens are now loss leaders.  Company executives appear to believe, possibly based on market research, that chicken customers purchase many other items on each store visit, resulting in higher total sales at checkout. 

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The Costco chicken also is the subject of lore.  Many, many online recipes offer ideas for incorporating roto-chicken in more complicated preparations.

I even read that Julia Child, the famed cookbook author, was a Costco chicken devotee.  I thought initially that this could not possibly be true.  But I was wrong.  An internet search turned up this bit from a Washington Post article in 2009.

       "She (Child) was not a snob about food," said her publicist. "I remember lunch one 

        day at her house: There was iceberg lettuce on the table, Hellmann's mayonnaise and 

        chicken. I said, 'This chicken is delicious,' " only to have Child reveal that it had come 

        from Costco. "She loved chicken and hot dogs from Costco."  

             (Costco has sold a hot dog/soda combo for $1.50 since the 1980s; I am not a tube

       steak fan and so have yet to sample this delicacy.  Still, if Julia Child liked them . . . .)

I myself learned about the chickens from a woman who herself learned about them by a friend who was an executive at Sur La Table, the high-end kitchen product retail chain.

Complaints

Nineteen E-coli cases in several states last year were traced to Costco rotisserie chicken salad.  The culprit could have been the chicken or another ingredient in the salads.  The E-coli hasn't flared up again, and 19 stomach viruses is not many out of 80 million chickens sold.  On the other hand, if you were one of the people who got sick, you probably would take a different view.

Costco chicken critics complain that the chickens are not organic enough, and Costco has pledged to sell only antibiotic-free chickens by sometime in 2017.  Nutritionists (and I) go back and forth on this issue.  At this point, free-range, organic chicken constitutes a very tiny, very expensive portion of the U.S. market.   With time, perhaps, this will change.