Bravo chain proud of private label items, multicultural produce department
by Mary Margaret Stewart / staff writer
Weston, Florida, became home to a new Bravo Supermarkets location in 2020, but the year came with some challenges.
Relinda Vásquez, president of the grocery chain, said the main recurring problem for her in the Miami area was securing items to keep people safe.
“At the end of the day, we want to have all the items to supply all the customers, but the main challenge has been finding all the safety products,” she added.
“In the beginning, it was quite hard because the country itself was running low on masks. Since it was all of a sudden, none of the companies were expecting that. There was a shortage with gloves and masks, so we were just all over the place trying to have all of the employees protected.”
With Miami seeing big flare-ups of COVID-19, Vásquez said the company did the best it could to mitigate exposure in the stores. It did so through education and enforcement of new protocols.
“We tried to have control in our stores to not get affected,” she said. “The main thing was implementing all the safety measurements, and then giving feedback to the employees of things that they can do and things that they cannot do so they can protect themselves.
“Some of them were not feeling it – having the mask or not having the mask. At that point, the mask was a must. I said, ‘OK, you have it, and if you don’t want to wear it, then you can’t be here because at the end of the day, we’re just protecting you and your family.’
According to Vásquez, the work environment was easier to enforce than the customers.
“Because some clients didn’t understand lines, social distancing, needing to wear a mask…so education. To educate the client is sometimes more difficult than educating your own employees.”
Another component that helped Bravo operations keep pace with demand in the early days of the pandemic was staffing.
“When everything was like crazy at the beginning, like March and April, we needed extra help…people were all over the place, and we didn’t know exactly how we were going to handle this,” she said. “We needed help because with the distortion of information, people were going crazy taking things off the shelf. It was like the world was ending, too – that’s how we felt.
“We tried to find and hire more people to work mostly overnights to be able to organize and sanitize the store for when we opened the store. It was a process.”
And with little guidance or help from state agencies, Vásquez said the company took measures into its own hands to institute new safety measures.
Looking back on the hectic times, Vásquez is most proud of what the company represents – “working with the community and providing work to all of its employees, which helps a lot of families.”
“We treat everybody like a family, and we serve the community. We try to make sure that the community can get the products that they’re asking for. We carry a little bit of everything.”
And Vásquez pointed to the stores’ offerings as one of the ways it caters to the communities’ needs, whether that’s through a robust multicultural produce department or competitively priced private label items.
Bravo Supermarkets was founded in New York in 1991 as an alternate name to its sister supermarket program, C-Town. In 2003, the first Florida Bravo opened in Orlando and was quickly followed by others around the state.
Today, there are more than 50 Bravos in Florida and another 60 in New York and surrounding areas. Stores recently opened in Lake Nona, Florida, and locations soon will debut in the Casselberry/Longwood area.
