RingCentral Online Blog

Truffle Farmers use RingCentral to Help Manage Their Business

RingCentral Online spoke with NYC-based Aron Ponticelli of Piedmont Valley Truffles about how RingCentral helps him manage a business half-way across the country, in North Carolina.

Why RingCentral?

AP: I think RingCentral is tremendous. I was partial to RingCentral because of the Inc. Magazine review [June 2006] that I read, but when I called, that's what got me. The customer service at RingCentral is just tremendous, you'd be surprised at how rude some of the other vendors are. RingCentral set up the service for me and showed me all the tools: for example, the Call Controller that pops up on my laptop when the phone rings, how I can check voicemails on the Web...I mean all of that is great for us because it gives our business the flexibility we need.

We hear that a lot.

AP: I'm between North Carolina and New York a few times a month, and I really see RingCentral as one of my primary tools, along with my Blackberry and my laptop.

Because you're in New York City and your business partner/father is in North Carolina, it must be challenging to manage your business affairs.

AP: Yes. What I like is that RingCentral keeps a detailed Call Log. We're both on the road a bit. I'm a little more organized, but sometimes my father is out in the field or on the road and he loses people's phone numbers or the numbers get lost in his cell phone and he loses voicemails. This way, we can both keep track of calls. We get email alerts of new voicemails; I get them on my Blackberry. And I can see calls coming in, and seeing calls come in is something I really like because truffles are not my full-time job yet; I have another full-time job.

So separating all these aspects of your life is critical for you.

AP: Yes, having the ability to see calls coming in for Piedmont Valley Truffles is great so I know how to handle the calls appropriately.

You're also setting up a truffle distribution organization with the other farmers, and you plan to sell on the Web with your RingCentral toll free number.

AP: There are a lot of small growers now, with between ½-acre to 3 acres of trees, and they're going to sell their truffles to the local restaurants so the market is going to get saturated - then they'll look for someone to sell their truffles outside of that area. What we're going to do is set up a consortium or a co-op and sell the truffles for them. The way I see it, why give your profits to a middle man? The farmers always get paid the least amount of money, and there's no reason we can't run the demand side of the business as well. Chefs and restaurants in New York City are just the beginning. I'll sell on the Web, and obviously the toll free number from RingCentral is going to become more important there. It's where your higher margins are made because you're selling wholesale - about $800 a pound wholesale. That's where the money is made.

How will RingCentral help you manage all of this?

AP: It takes about three to four years to cultivate truffles and we expect an influx of calls during the next truffle season, December through March. As a way for us to manage things, we have the option to not take some of those calls and let them go to voicemail, which will be emailed to us. We can then look at the Call Log to see who called and when the calls came in. I have calls ring to my home and my cell and wherever else I may be. Also, I will have all of my truffle business calls and faxes centralized. I don't want calls going to my cell phone's voicemail or a different business email because I don't want them co-mingled with my other calls. It also allows me to make sure that other employees in the company are following up with important callers.

Your employees will also use RingCentral?

AP: We have a lot of farm workers we need to contact, and we will have a customer service department. And I really see that as we expand, RingCentral will be growing with us. I would like to build a sales team, who will be traveling around, and I know I'm going to be traveling all over, so to be able to manage that process is great.

I didn't realize truffles were being cultivated in North Carolina. Typically, this is not a product produced in the US.

AP: We're really finding that where grapes for wine can be cultivated pretty successfully is where black truffles can be as well. There's been a lot of success in cultivating truffles in the mid-Atlantic states on both sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which has an agreeable "terroir": the soil, sunshine, wind factors, etc. North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee share similar attributes to southern France and northern Italy.

How do you cultivate and harvest truffles?

AP: We bought seedlings inoculated with Tuber melanosporum, the Perigord truffle, from our partner Franklin Garland who was the first to bring inoculated seedlings to the US. He bought the process from the French in the early 1980s. You're taking either oak or hazelnut trees about a couple of weeks old and essentially you're

Importer's New Marketing Effort has the Wine do the Talking

RingCentral Online spoke with Patrick Mata of New York-based Ole Imports about how he uses RingCentral to give wines a "voice," providing the missing piece to the beverage's role in our five senses.

[Hear what this wine has to say: GI Grenacha]

You're using RingCentral as an interesting marketing tool, to provide information about your Spanish wines. How?

PM: Basically, what we wanted to do is to make wines that appeal to the five senses so not only wines that you can taste, touch, and see, but wines that you can hear. We use it to give wines a voice.

I'm with you. Please explain how, and what prompted you to create this marketing effort?

PM: Well, when people go to the stores, sometimes they're intimidated by so many wines and they don't really know how to choose one. "Why this wine and not another wine?" It's helpful to hear something that explains a little bit more about wine rather than judge them by looking at the label and looking at the grape. So we decided to have an extension for each of the wines. We have 100 wines and we would like to develop 100 extensions. Right now we have five extensions for five different wines.

How does the public use it?

PM: The toll-free number and extensions are written on the back labels of the wine, so as we print new labels, all of those extensions will be available for all 100 wines. On the back label, it says, "Hear me out. Call Ole Vino at 888-OLEVINO." This also appears on the cases, our Web site, and it appears on some shelf talkers.

What do your wines say?

PM: Each recording is a personification of each wine. So, the recording can say, "Hello, I'm G1 and I'm from Costa Brava. I'm made with 100% grenacha grapes and I go very well with..." They're appealing. Wine is something that's very rigid. It doesn't move, it doesn't talk. If that product could possibily talk, it's just more interesting and it appeals to you in a much bigger way, especially when you're deciding if you want to buy it.

So a customer would dial the toll-free number while they're in the store, is that the idea?

PM: They can do it from the store, from a restaurant, from home. Also, we have 680 salespeople in the nation and they can dial the number and learn about the wine before they make a presentation. And when they make the presentation, they can dial the number and put the phone to a speaker so everyone can hear what the wine is all about. All of the recordings are downloadable from our Web site and can be put on an iPod.

Fantastic. By the way, what do you mean by GI, G2, etc.?

PM: They are the names of the wine. G wines are a series of wines made with 100% granacha, which is called grenache in France. Granacha grows in a lot of different parts in Spain. The wines are named according to where the grapes were grown: G1, G2, G3, G4, G5. All of them are made with the same grape but grown in different areas. And of course, that makes a huge difference in the wines.

Can you tell me a little about Ole Imports?

PM: Basically we import about 100 different wines from all over Spain and sell them in 34 different states in the U.S. Out of many importers of Spanish wines in the U.S., we are one of the few who specialize in only Spanish wines.

You're from Spain, is that right?

PM: Yes, I am from Malaga, from the south.

Your marketing tool is also an educational tool.

PM: This is very educational. We are very committed to importing wines but also making sure that people understand what is behind the label, which is one of the reasons why we wanted these wines to have a voice.

Do you make some of the wines that you sell?

PM: Yes, we also make some wines in Spain. We started in 1999 when I was in college. I came from Spain to go to college in this country and from my dorm room in Florida, I started importing Spanish wines. Basically things went very well, very fast in the beginning, and I graduated and moved to New York and 8 years later we're in 34 states, and we're in 3rd or 4th place in the nation for Spanish wines.

Do you think people need this type of information?

PM:You can't give enough information about your product especially when a lot of people are looking to learn more about wine. So this is one way of providing useful information to the final consumer. Even though all of this information is available online and on our back labels, the fact that you can hear it makes these wines more appealing to the consumer. The consumer can relate much more to a wine that has a voice than to a wine that is mute.

WinesandRecipes.com: Matching wine and recipes for wine buyers

RingCentral interviewed Jon Holland, founder of WinesandRecipes.com, an innovative Web-based tool that helps shoppers in grocery and wine stores pair wines with cheese and recipes.

What is WinesandRecipes.com?

Jon: WinesandRecipes.com is a marriage of Internet technology and in-store kiosk technology that stores can use to help consumers find wines that meet their needs regarding price, wine type, and taste characteristics, and it matches their food and cheese choices. The kiosks only give information to consumers about products that are in the store.

Where do you get your information?

Jon: We have 20 different sources working with us: wine experts, recipe developers, chefs, cheese experts...They supply the information on wines, cheese pairings, and recipes that are in our database. We also reference published articles about wine, winemaker notes, reports, and online recipe sources.

How did you come up with this idea?

Jon: I conceived of it three years ago on Father's Day while driving with family and a friend to pick up a boat in Florida. We were bouncing around ideas, and noted that there was this confusion in the market about wine. We thought it would be great to have in-store information available to consumers: Why rely on sales help, which doesn't even exist in a grocery store environment? And when you're in a store, holding the wine, you're not going to remember all that information you read about it. WinesandRecipes.com lets you scan the bottle and tells you whether it's a good price and if it meets your taste requirements. Then it gives you cheeses and recipes to go with it.

Most people just look at the label.

Jon: A lot of consumers that make wine-buying decisions look at the price and the label, which is the absolute wrong way to do it. They buy wine that have wine labels with animals - ducks and kangaroos.

Now they can scan the bottle and make a better decision about what they want to buy.

I can pair wine with cheese or recipes using your tool, but can I pair a meal I plan to make for dinner with a wine in the store?

We're currently creating a meal match tool, which will match wines with the meal you're planning to make. For instance if you're making Chicken Marsala, it will pair a wine with the poultry, the sauce, etc., and make recommendations.

Can you give me an example of nice pairing?

Jon: Yes. Rosé is an up and coming wine that people don't know a lot about. It's great cold with barbecue! For the White Zinfandel drinkers who are scared to try anything else, Rosé provides a bridge. The other night I went out and bought 3 or 4 bottles of Rosé: American, Italian, sparkling, and one from the Cotes du Rhone. They were $10 to $15 bottles and we paired them with 4 or 5 cheeses, chocolate and strawberries. We were just chatting and noticed that the chocolate with the sparkling Rosé was similar to chocolate covered cherries. Delicious.

So you taste the wines, too?

Jon: I do regular tastings. We felt that the cheese pairings with the Rosé that Raymond Hook (their cheese guru) did were great for the French wines but didn't go so well with the Italian and sparkling wines. We had to go back to the drawing board with him to make sure those cheeses are paired to that region and varietal. Last night, we tried a Spanish Rosé. It went well with the brie and the St. André cheeses.

Do you have a background in the wine industry?

Jon: No, I'm a wine enthusiast, following my passion. I'm more on the business side of it. My business partner, Marshall, has more than 20 years industry experience on the technical side of wine. WinesandRecipes.com will satisfy the needs everyone, from the average consumer, who probably could care less about the particulars of Cotes du Rhone, to the expert who wants to find a Stag's Leap Cabernet. We have different palate ranges but enjoy the great complexity of wines and what goes well with certain foods.

Sounds as if you really are passionate about your work.

Jon: Yes, but it's interesting...people can be passionate about something: religion, politics, sexual orientation, for example, and they are unbending. But with wine, people will concede to the fact that we all have different tastes, and we'll agree to disagree, and it's OK. We'd all be a lot better off if we drank more wine.

I couldn't agree with you more. What is your favorite wine?

Jon: I love Zinfandels from the Russian River Valley and big fruity California Cabs and Australian Shiraz. I don't like Pinot Noir and, yes, I did see the movie Sideways. Yet, if you pair Pinots with the right food...My business partner and I had a Pinot in a restaurant in Napa recently, and it was paired with grilled duck and artichokes - it was great. But just sipping Pinot alone, it's too light-bodied for me. Same with the European wines. I'm not a big lover of Italian wines, but paired with food...

Italian wines are my favorite.

Jon: And that's OK. See what I mean.

About RingCentral...how do you use it?

Jon: We've been using RingCentral for about 2 years now, and we feel that RingCentral is part of our team! We like that we can transfer calls to our phones and have additional extensions and internet fax, and that we can pick up voicemail through our email and manage our calls online. I'm traveling and on the road about 10 days a month, and RingCentral helps me manage my time. I can prioritize my voicemail and faxes via my email inbox. The virtual operator and the 800 number allow us to provide the same level of customer service as a larger company without the overhead of an outrageously expensive phone system. And it's a great price.

Where can we find your WinesandRecipes.com kiosks?

Jon: Currently there are only two deployments of the branded kiosks, one is in Faustos Food Palace in the Key West. In the next six months, you'll see a hybrid of ours and what was a competitor at one point. By the end of the year, you'll see our branded product out in different locations across the country and hybrids in national chain stores.

Recently we received a call from a large brewery and an industry group who asked us if this technology can be adapted for beer.

BeersandRecipes.com?

Jon: Could be. But we'd have to hire some experts. I don't know a lot about beer.

For more information about WinesandRecipes.com, check out their Web site: www.winesandrecipes.com. Or reach them by phone: 888-450-4529.