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Post your Kids Chef Hat and Apron fun family-time activities online! While television chefs may be their culinary role models, parents of the kids chef hat and apron are turning off the tube and going to the stove for some good, old-fashioned home entertainment. That's helped the market for tot-sized, high-quality cookware and kitchen tools, scaled-down chef's apparel and cookbooks geared toward younger readers grow.
Now the market has moved beyond novelty.De la Villefromoy said, and he is among the many who advocate the cross-merchandising of kids chef hat and apron products, for instance marketing aprons and chef hats with cookware and smaller-sized utensils. "I really believe that kids' cooking equipment is becoming its own little category," he said. "If you go around to the really nice kitchenware stores with cooking schools, they all are doing chef hat craft for kids' these days."
Perhaps one of the most visible examples of this was the launch in May of a $59 set of children's cookware under All-Clad's Emerilware brand. All-Clad has teamed a 2-quart stockpot with three scaled-down kitchen tools, an apron and matching oven mitts, Baby Bam spice and Emeril Lagasse's new cookbook, "There's a Chef in My Soup!" which is written for children. "The children's kitchenware market is growing, and growing very fast,"said Catherine Fischer, vice president of sales and marketing at All-Clad. Kitchen Etc. buyer Donna Forte agrees. "Over the last two years, this category has really evolved because kids chef hat and apron is a fun family-time activity," she said."We've started to merchandise it all together," said Forte. "If you want to make a kids' statement, you need to pull everything together." Kids' cooking programs, too, "have sprung up all over the place,"said All-Clad's Fischer, noting programs run by such a specialty retailer as Sur La Table as examples of kids chef hat and apron successful cooking programs.Although Chef's Catalog also plans to offer the Emerilware Kid's Cookware Set this fall, Michael Lubka, senior vice president of the Chef's Catalog division of Neiman Marcus Direct, said he isn't sure about the staying power of the category. "It's the equivalent for us of the good old Calphalon days where they would do these gift sets and we would go out and spin it. A 4-quart soup pot became the `Dallas Tortilla Soup Pot,' " he said. "Kids' cookware is the same way. For a period of time, it's fresh and exciting, and you can give someone a reason to buy it." Kids Chef Hat and Apron cooking programs is a hit!
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