A year after it was launched by Omaha Steaks, online prepared-foods purveyor A La Zing is working has hooked up with frozen-foods manufacturer Cuisine Solutions to create FiveLeaf.com. Launched in Feburary, the Website sells frozen meals created by such top-name chefs as Daniel Boulud and Charlie Trotter.
Food gifts cataloger Omaha Steaks is handling the fulfillment, Web and phone orders, and creative for FiveLeaf.com; A La Zing is hosting the FiveLeaf Website. Web users who type in the FiveLeaf.com address are automatically redirected to the A La Zing site. The meals are flash-frozen in Cuisine Solutions’s Alexandria, VA, factory and shipped to Omaha Steaks’ fulfillment center in Omaha, NE.
Omaha Steaks will also produce an eight-page catalog for FiveLeaf this April that will be used as a package insert and for catalog requests, says Ann Zimmer Colony, A La Zing’s brand manager. The company will begin testing a package-insert offer to prospects in mid-March. “Based on results,” Colony says, “we’ll consider additional campaigns both direct mail and/or mass catalog mailings.”
After launching A La Zing as a spin-off Web business in February 2001, Omaha Steaks in June printed 10,000 copies of an eight-page catalog just for package inserts and requesters. Colony says the piece resembles a menu rather than a catalog, though it includes the toll-free ordering number and Website address. The company plans to begin distributing a 16-page redesigned catalog in mid-April, but it will continue to function as a support piece to the Website and not as a mass-mailed book, Colony says.