FireLake Discount Foods hosts world's largest grape display
FireLake Discount Foods, Shawnee, Okla., hosted the world's largest grape display before, during and after Labor Day weekend in partnership with a fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association program "Aisles of Smiles."
Discounted prices brought shoppers, and shoppers were asked at the register to buy a card for $1 or $5 to donate to the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The fundraiser and grape promotion were also taking place at two FireLake Express Grocery locations.
"I know we've generated quite a bit so far just from what I've seen," store manager Don Clay said. "The cards that the customers pay for, we put their names on them and then we hang them up in the windows of the stores ... I know I saw a couple hundred cards over at the other store, and we've probably got a hundred in the window at this store also."
The grapes, normally priced at $2.49 per pound, were 77 cents per pound from Aug. 31 to Sept. 6.
Fresno, Calif.-based Mirabella Farms Inc., which provided the grapes, and Amarillo, Texas-based Affiliated Foods Inc., a cooperative of which FireLake is part, provided special pricing to FireLake to cut the price.
"Everybody kind of pitched in on all three sides," said Mirabella owner Philippe Markarian, who traveled to Oklahoma to help set up the display.
Clay and Markarian were among 15 people who worked for about four hours to build the display, which was made up of 2,040 cases of grapes - 39,780 pounds of the fruit.
"We do as much research as we can to find out what was the last 'world's largest,' and Phillipe had that information, and we cleared it (by) I think three or four thousand pounds," Clay said. "It was the full semi load."
Markarian said that from what he saw the grapes seemed to be doing their job as a draw to the store.
"They had pretty good foot traffic at the time, so it was selling quite well," Markarian said. "In fact, this particular store that we had the display in is open 24 hours, and while we were setting up people were wanting to buy the grapes, so we had to tell them to come back tomorrow morning."
Two and a half days into the promotion, the grapes were still moving quickly.
"They've already sold through pretty much more than half of it as of right now," Markarian said.
FireLake has done large displays before, but Clay said this one seemed to resonate particularly well.
"Customers seemed to really enjoy it maybe a little better than some of them," Clay said. "Just the colors, I think, is probably what made it stand out more than anything. We had red seedless, green seedless, black seedless and red globe grapes on it."
