Seattle, WA | Specialty Food & Wine Shop | Cheese & Provisions Club

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Key Results
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• Guaranteed orders for small producers who couldn't otherwise land bulk business
• A wider audience for DeLaurenti's curation, reaching subscribers beyond Pike Place Market foot traffic
• Subscribers returning to the counter to repurchase products they discovered in their box
• Subscriptions purchased as holiday gifts, extending DeLaurenti's brand through word of mouth

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Eighty years at the corner of First and Pike

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DeLaurenti Food & Wine has anchored the entrance to Seattle's Pike Place Market since 1946, when Pete DeLaurenti opened a small grocery selling imported cheeses and Italian provisions that most Seattleites had never encountered. His son Louie took over in 1972 and moved the shop to its current corner location, where it has remained a fixture. DeLaurenti became one of the first shops in the city to offer cheese cut to order, pizza by the slice, and espresso. 

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Today, spread across two full floors, the shop carries hundreds of cheeses, a deep deli and antipasti selection, and a wine program with well over a thousand bottles. There’s even an upstairs spritz bar and kitchen production space upstairs that, as deli manager and buyer Elyse Hoang points out, plenty of regulars don't even know exists.

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Every product on the shelves on both levels of DeLaurenti’s space has been personally tasted and vetted, either by Elyse or by one of the shop's buyers. It's a standard that makes the in-store experience feel personal: a customer asks what's good, and the answer comes from someone who genuinely stands behind it.

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More good products than foot traffic could move

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DeLaurenti's decision to start a club came down to a straightforward read of its own potential. The shop had built relationships with more interesting products, and more producers, than the foot traffic of any single day at Pike Place Market could fully showcase. And its full, two-floor inventory held more curation than most customers ever saw or shopped from in one visit. That depth was an opportunity waiting for a wider audience: a way to put DeLaurenti's curation in front of people across Seattle, not just the ones walking by that week.

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The idea took shape after watching a neighboring restaurant, Lady Jaye, launch its own club with Table22.

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"We work pretty closely with Lady Jaye," Elyse explains, "and we saw that they were doing [a club] and we were kind of intrigued. So we looked it up and we're like, yeah, we have so many products that we want to introduce customers to. So it was perfect."

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Built-in demand for bulk orders

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One of the clearest advantages of the subscription model is one Elyse didn't fully anticipate going in: a pre-order structure that guarantees a home for products before they're purchased. That's made it possible to support brands that would otherwise be too small to justify the order size.

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"I discovered these brisket chips last month. They're a tiny little company in California. We literally emailed them and said, we want to feature you in the Table22 subscription, we're going to order 50 of these…It's awesome to be able to support these small companies that normally wouldn't be getting those huge orders."

— Elyse Hoang, Deli Manager & Buyer, DeLaurenti Food & Wine

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The subscription model also brings collaboration and creativity to choosing what goes in the club box. Each month, the team meets in the first week to decide what to feature, often pulling from what's most exciting and personal to them - like a recent selection built around a cheese that one of DeLaurenti's own cheesemongers had encountered firsthand during a training internship at the creamery in Spain.

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The subscription's predictable, recurring structure means DeLaurenti isn't guessing at demand before placing these orders. The commitment is already there, which makes it easier to take a chance on a producer the shop believes in, or to share a niche store-favorite at a broader scale.

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Bringing members back to the counter

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The club has deepened DeLaurenti's in-store relationships in ways that extend beyond the monthly box itself. Subscribers regularly come back into the shop asking about specific products from a recent delivery, wanting to track down the exact crackers or cheese they tried at home.

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"It always feels really good when a regular comes into the counter and asks, hey, I had those crackers that you had in the Table22 subscription, can you show me which ones they are? I think that's really cool. They're buying it again -- like, we got them, you know? That's so fun."

— Elyse Hoang, Deli Manager & Buyer, DeLaurenti Food & Wine

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That return visit is the on-premise payoff: a subscriber who might never have tried a particular product walks back through the door specifically because of something the club introduced them to. That enthusiasm helps explain how the club has made its way into even more members’ hands; right after the holidays, Elyse noticed a wave of subscriptions that had been purchased as gifts. It’s a rewarding sign that subscribers are vouching for DeLaurenti to people in their own lives the same way she vouches for a product at the counter.

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Creative curation, without the overhead

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For Elyse, part of what's made the club sustainable month over month is how little operational weight it's added to her plate. Between buying, curating the shop floor, and running the deli day-to-day, she doesn't have bandwidth to manage a separate billing system or chase down customer details by hand. The Table22 platform handles that logistics layer, even around something as routine as dietary restrictions, so the curation remains part she actually spends her time on.

"Honestly, the online platform, the website, makes it so easy because it's so organized," Elyse says. "We don't have to think about it too hard."

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That ease is also what shapes her advice to other operators considering a club of their own. For her, the value isn't just the infrastructure, it's the room it leaves for the part of the job she actually enjoys: deciding what goes in the box and why.

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"You should just do it,” Elyse says, “because the ability to have creative freedom of picking whatever you want to put into the curation is just so freeing. Being able to talk about it and change it every month, I think, makes it really, really cool."

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Our platform, your provisions. Welcome to the club

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Ready to start your own club? See how Table22 works for specialty food shops — and explore the DeLaurenti Cheese & Provisions Club at app.table22.com/product/delaurenti-cheese-and-provisions-club.

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