NYDP Deli Patrol

It started innocently enough. Who knew we were soon to create the world’s first para-culinary strike force? But we’re getting ahead of the story.

In the beginning, there was Deli-Arts - a mid-life crisis gone tasty - and then a little commercial. It’s a familiar story I suppose. I was a high tech guy - a foodie, ex-New Yorker - turning 50 and my thoughts turned to pastrami.

I mean really, with all that’s going on around us, what’s more important? As a New Yorker living in Boston, I was noshstalgic. I missed the great taste treats of my youth. So I start looking around on the web and visiting delis all over the place and discovered there were lots of people like me - all over the country - folks who miss the real thing they remember.

So after a bunch of research – and it took a while - we started making and selling some pastrami. And it was good. And then we turned our hand to corned beef. And people started serving our stuff around Fenway Park in Boston and in top-tier delis and retailers around town. Well, next thing you know, some more deli-mavens living away from New York came along with investment dollars to help spread the deli-gospel.

Then, John O’Brien, one of the world’s greatest experts on how to build a quality deli-products business, ate one of our pastrami sandwiches. For more than a decade, he’d led a major division at Boar’s Head developing and marketing more than 300 products. He’d held senior leadership positions with industry giants like Smithfield, Anco, and Applegate Farms. And after one sandwich, John jumped at the challenge and opportunity of helping us grow to serve bigger markets. John persuaded us that the world needed our quality touch on a larger assortment of deli items, and that supermarkets would love to offer our artisan-quality deli products for all the major proteins.

But that was a big job. Scaling up our production to support supermarket volumes and diversifying our assortment to cover a much broader line would take some doing. But people kept telling us to go for it. So we recruited more help. And, once people tasted our stuff, it wasn’t hard finding more experts ready to help. They knew a good cause when they tasted it.

Culinary, production, operations, packaging, design, and marketing experts from all over the Northeast, and from as far away as Georgia and Wisconsin lent a hand. Pretty soon, we were a determined band on a serious mission.

NYDP Deli Patrol was born.