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connecticut

Emily Knapton

Mark6AML214_2025-02-14-06-16-58

Well, we made it to Friday. Time for Main Street, Connecticut, a chance to showcase our local towns and cities and everything they have to offer. Today we're featuring everything Valentine's Day. News 12 Connecticut's Mark Sudall is at the Shoprite on West Main Street in Stamford. Well, you know, flowers are certainly a big time gift for Valentine's Day, and usually when you think of flowers, you think of a florist, but. Your local grocery store has a lot to offer. Tom Sangari Junior from Shoprite stores is here with us. Thank you so much. Nice to see you, Mark. How are you doing? Happy birthday to you. Thank you on Valentine's Day. That's right. Yes, I, I'm, I'm one of the lucky guys to be born on Valentine's Day and be in charge of selling flowers as well. So it's, uh, it's a stressful birthday usually on, on these types of years, but it, you know, it's great. So it's so surprising now that you guys and I I get more and more grocery stores are selling flowers, but we don't normally think about that. Why is that? Well, I mean, typically when somebody thinks about Valentine's Day and thinks about buying flowers, they think about going to a florist, but over the past probably 15 to 20 years, supermarkets have gotten a lot better at, at, at sourcing flowers and also being able to sell you premium high quality flowers. And one of the reasons why, you know, we have so much last minute business and about 75% to 80% of our sales of flowers for the Valentine's Day holiday are on Valentine's Day, literally on the day. And where do you get them? Uh, well, we source them. I believe they're primarily about 90 to 95% from. Colombia. So we go direct from a, uh, a company called Sunshine Bouquet. They, they bring them in direct from, uh, Colombia. There's no wholesaler at all. So you, you actually free up a couple days of sitting in a warehouse. So we have the freshest possible flowers that you can get, um, at a great, you know, reasonable price, about. 40 to 50% less than going to a florist by coming to us. Wow, yeah, and certainly. The convenience of this as well. I mean, most people come to the store to shop for their food, but then they can also do this too. That's exactly right. I mean, most of the people that are coming into the shop, they some of them don't even realize that we carry flowers for Valentine's Day, so it's like a one stop shop. They could come in, they can get their groceries, they can get their Valentine's Day flowers, and they could also come in and see one of our florists in the store, and they can do anything, you know, custom made arrangements, bouquets. We have a ton of variety of flowers so you can kind of mix and match and make your own. Bouquet or arrangement, they'll do it while you shop and by the time you're done, it'll be ready for you to go. I think I heard something like 140,000 flowers that you sold last year. 140,000 bouquets, dozens of roses, yeah. We sell a lot of flowers, uh, you know, that's, that's between all 12 of our locations, yeah, yeah, not just here, not just here's for sure, yeah, we have, uh, we have 12 locations in Connecticut, um, and so that's the aggregate of, of, of all of the flowers that we sell. But this is our actually our busiest flower shop, so here in Commerce Road in Stamford, Connecticut. Tom, thank you so much for being with us. Happy birthday. Thank you, Mark. Make sure you think about that someone special on Valentine's Day and get those flowers. Thank you. All right.

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Mark7AML214_2025-02-14-07-20-14

Oh, we made it to Friday. Time for Main Street, Connecticut. Local towns and cities and everything they have to offer today we are featuring Valentine's Day. News 12 Connecticut's Mark Sudall is at Fairfield University bookstore this morning. All right, you catching up on your reading? Are you doing some shopping, Mark? I'm doing some shopping and some reading. Happy Valentine's Day to everybody and Love is in the Everywhere I look around, here it is right here and you know you don't think about the kids right on Valentine's Day. Carla Oliver is here with us this morning. Thank you so much. What do we need to know about these cute little books? Love is indeed in the air at the Fairfield University bookstore. Not just today on Valentine's Day. Happy day to you all, but every single day we are spreading the love. We of course have love books for adults and children. We of course have some candies. Oh yes, show us your candy. We have B Bissinger's chocolates which are. Delicious dark and milk chocolate choices that we of course are wrapping for the day. Uh, a perfect gift for the stagmates out there. Stagmates just happen to be. Alums from Fairfield University who are now married and so we celebrate all the love today. Now, were some of them married here? is that what you told me? Not yet, but I will be very happy to have a wedding. That would be pretty cool. It's pretty enough. We can do it. We've done a lot of fun events here. We actually do read to the children every Saturday. Uh, we're gonna read Heartfelt today and keep the love going all weekend. That's today and this weekend. Yes, all weekend. Wow. And you've got the school colors going here every day we are in our red and white representing Fairfield. Do you have a little Valentine's cheer for us? Wow. I put you right on the spot there, didn't I? Why? Why don't I toast you with our love drink. Come on over, Kyle. Kyle, what do you have over here? What is this? What? Are you kidding me? And then we have our Valentine's Day cake pop on top. Thank you, Kyle. Happy Valentine's Day. Thank you, Kyle. Happy Valentine's Day to all of you. Wow. Do you mind if I give this one a try? Oh, it's like ice cold and just looks delicious. Becky, what do you think about this, huh? Oh wow. What does it taste like? Well, it's chocolatey. It's got some strawberries in there too, right? Do you know what's in this thing? Made with love, made with love. OK, that's in there too, um, mocha sauce, strawberry sauce. Oh yeah, you gotta get yourself one of these. OK, that's good for Valentine's Day and you know, go ahead and and Becky, I, I've given you some ideas here. Look, I mean, you've got some books here for the grandkids. You can get some, some chocolates for for friends. I mean, it's, it's just a one stop shop here. Yeah, they've got cards and they've got, they've got all kinds of things because we've got love for everyone. Really good stuff. And this, and this is still through, um, oh sorry, I, I guess we'll wrap it up here. OK. Happy Valentine's to you both. All right, folks are expected in fact to shell out some big bucks this Valentine's Day. A National Retail Federation survey shows consumers are expected to spend a record $27.5 billion for the holiday. Individually, shoppers will spend on average nearly $190. That's up about $3 from last year. The survey suggests the spending bump could be due to more people celebrating the big day. And if you're in need of a last minute gift idea, the National Retail Federation also says the most popular gifts this year are candy followed by flowers and greeting cards, and last, a nice evening out.

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Mark8aml214_2025-02-14-09-01-05

All right, we made it to Friday. It's time for Main Street, Connecticut, a chance to showcase our local towns and cities and everything they have to offer today. It's all about Valentine's Day. News 12 Connecticut's Mark Sudall is at Beach Cho a lot over on Killside Road in Fairfield. Oh, I, I'm sure it smells and tastes delicious over there, Mark. Oh, it all looks so good. And of course, when you think of Valentine's Day, of course you think about chocolate. Benoit Ray is here with us this morning. Thank you so much. Good morning right from Belgium yourself, a Belgian native. Tell me about all the goodies you've got here. So you have to realize this is a little bit of our Super Bowl, right? Valentine's Day for chocolate chops it's like, you know, very intense. We have a lot of things that we offer. We do a message. which is the one that you had. We also have fresh strawberries that are pre order. We still have a few in the store that people can walk in for. And then of course we are Belgian chocolatiers, so we do really delicate chocolates that are all handmade here, small batches. You can see it's happening right now like as I was telling, we are just doing the production for today. There was a lot of preparation in terms of what is available. We have lips which are amazing, so. Nothing else symbolizes Valentine's more than that. One of them is called Vanilla Midnight. So if you want to try it, oh yeah, I'll hold on I'll try that in a moment. I love the shoe. My wife would love that. I shoe can be filled in with chocolates additionally, and then we have this beautiful display mirror that is under it and some customers asked to write a little message as well, not the same day, but it's a possibility. And chocolate is made here, is that right? Yes, everything. So we import the chocolate from Belgium. We melt it overnight and then everything is made here. So there is no other preparation. Everything is here. So as you see, we're just drizzling the strawberry right now. And we're in Greenfield Hill in Fairfield. So how long did it take to get all this ready for today? So we've been preparing all week, a little bit before 2, but a lot of this is fresh. So it's just a question of putting more hours, having a little bit more staff this week to make sure that you know based on what we sold, we'll just make sure that we have enough the next day. So certainly I think among all the chocolates made around the world, Belgian chocolate has to be right up there. So yeah, it's supposed to be one of the best in the world, and honestly we start with a great product. So we have this reputation to combine locally sourced products with traditional chocolate. So we try to be very creative, have a lot of splashes and beautiful design that people really enjoy to. But at the same time when they taste it, you're buying a chocolate. You really want the best chocolate. So we're using a lot of the creativity of Victoria Charon, who is over there. She is designing most of the design of the chocolate. So just again, really, really good chocolate, but more importantly fresh and looking good. OK, now Becky, I for this experience. I've got to try this experience. These are the lips. This is white chocolate inside, is that right? Yes, so the ganache inside is a white chocolate. We call it the vanilla midnight. And uh we're using mascar vanilla extract for this and then vanilla bean paste so you get this amazing complex combination. It is a really good combination of vanilla bean you can taste. And almost like a hint of coconut in there, yeah, absolutely, yes. And so as, as you can see, like this symbolized the love for chocolate. So they come in boxes of 5 and all different flavors so much, absolutely really good stuff, Becky. This is uh. Of course, what you want to do for Valentine's. Yeah, you have to do some shopping there.

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News 12 is checking out all of the best gifts for Valentine's Day

Main Street Connecticut: Showcasing the best treats for Valentine's Day

News 12 is checking out all of the best gifts for Valentine's Day

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