Times Advocate - Business - June 27, 1993

by Andrea Moss, Times Advocate

Vista - Deli trays brimming with glistening meats and cheeses, pizzas smothered with tasty toppings, luscious, mouthwatering desserts - Fax Foods in Vista can whip up just about any culinary treat your little heart desires. The good new is none of these delightful creations will add to your waistline. The bad new is that though these fabulous foods may look tempting they won't exactly taste good.

That's because every one of them is a fake - the products Fax Foods specializes in are food facsimiles made of plastic. The company made $1 million last year creating faux food for restaurants, delis and other food-oriented businesses.

Why would a restaurant, of all places, want plastic food? Because, say company founder Francesco Dorigo and vice president Pat Hileman, food replicas help lower costs and increase sales.

"Restaurants ask us, 'Why should we buy plastic food when we can use the real thing?' "Hileman said. "I tell them, 'to save money and increase sales.'"

Enticing visual displays of appetizers, desserts and other house specialties help sell those extra items. But even when made fresh daily, the real thing doesn't hold up well: ice creams and chocolates melt, bananas turn brown and other foods lose their fresh appeal.

Food replicas stay fresh looking indefinitely, making them a cost-effective sales booster. Acapulco Restaurants' experience bears this out. The restaurant chains gave faux food dessert trays a trial run last year and were immediately sold on them.

"We did an initial test in the fall and winter of '92 at two L.A. units (restaurants) and two San Diego units," said Darryl Acoba, marketing director for the chain. "We found sales just about doubled in the first month."

"People see that tray and they decide to have (one of those) items," he continued. "To see that percentage increase sustained, that was amazing."

Acapulco implemented the faux food program across the board in September 1992. "It's a strong buildup for sales add-ons," he said.

Lisa Lemmon, of Gelatamore Products, Inc., a Pacific Beach company which sells gelatos (ice cream concoctions covered in chocolate, resembling giant truffles) to restaurants for their dessert trays, is experiencing a similar increase in sales. "It's really hard to get your product into a place; restaurants seldom change their menus," she said.

Lemmon asked Fax Foods to emulate a tray of her goodies and, upon receiving them began passing them out as samples to area restaurants. "I got them last week, and I've already gotten calls," she said. "The restaurants order three times as much."

The idea of food replicas is not new. Originated in Egypt, They were first mass-produced in Japan. Dorigo began experimenting with faux food several years ago. A soft-spoken man who emigrated from Italy, he studied culinary arts extensively in Switzerland as a teen-ager and spent a number of years as a gourmet chef for various cruise lines.

He also began dabbling in sculpture, and eventually worked his way to creating food replicas. He finally made the switch to faux food full-time, founding Fax Foods in Los Angeles in 1989. The company moved to Vista in April, purchasing a 15,000-square-foot building in the Waterview Business Park. For each food item, Dorigo himself designs a mold, by pouring liquid silicone, aluminum, iron or fiberglass over either the real thing or a clay sculpture he has created. Liquid plastic or foam rubber is then poured into the mold and baked in a giant microwave oven.

After cooling, excess material is trimmed or ground off, and the piece is painted to give it a lifelike appearance - gingerbread men are spray-painted a toasty brown for a baked look and then hand-painted with eyes, mouth and other details; cakes are "decorated"; pizza toppings are colored one by one. Just how real does the pseudo food look? Real enough that you feel compelled to keep touching it to make sure it really isn't real. And occasionally the food looks too good.

According to Hileman, once or twice a restaurant has come back to the company to ask that a particular faux food be redone and made to look less attractive. The restaurants' customers were apparently disappointed when what was served to them compared less than favorably with the display version they'd been shown.

Another time, a health inspector walked into the company's offices and manufacturing facilities, walked over to a long table where a variety of food replicas were laid out, and prepared to grade the company non its preparation standards. "We had to tell the guy, 'Hey wait a minute, these aren't real,'" Hileman said.

The company's hottest product is "replikale," fake kale used to decorate salad bars and deli cases.

The kale is so popular, in fact, that Dorigo and company are manufacturing it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Shoney's Restaurants, a chain in the South and Midwest, recently ordered 15,000 pieces of replikale, and Acapulco, Jack in the Box and several other restaurants use it at all their locations.

The company, however, is completely flexible and willing to re-create any food requested. They've made fakes for use in movies and commercials, a 3-foot-ong chocolate-covered banana to hang in a theater chain's lobby, and vegetables for a display in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Just hitting its stride, Fax Foods expects to double its sales this year. With recent market study showing a $40 million potential nationwide, the company, with only one competitor, definitely has a wide field open to it.

Meanwhile, Dorigo loves what he is doing. Asked if he missed being gourmet chef he shrugged, smiled gently, then said, "I am a gourmet chef." He certainly is, and a particularly smart one too.

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