Winning a Niche Online, Big Retailers as Educators & AI Visibility with Sonja Hoffmann

Hi. As you said, my name is Sonja Hoffmann. I’m originally from Germany with a Swiss mom, so I have very strong ties to Switzerland. We moved to the US in 1998, and now we are US citizens. I’ve been operating an online store since 2002, and I’m now operating a store called Raclette Corner, where you can find everything for raclette: grills, cheeses, accessories and so on. I’m your go-to when you’d like anything from raclette.

Initially I started with an online kitchen store with European cookware. The reason was that I was fed up with the kitchenware I could buy in the US. I didn’t like it that much, and I liked the German brands. So I started a kitchen store with European cookware that also had raclette grills and espresso machines in it. That was more than twenty years ago, in 2002, and online shopping for those items was very rare. The German companies I was representing online required me to get permission from their German headquarters to actually sell their products online. That’s how it started.

When we first started, of course, I had to explain to people how to even pronounce raclette, that’s for sure. Nowadays, through social media, travel and the general foodie trend, quite a few people know about raclette. So my education goes more into what kind of cheese, where the cheese comes from, why we need to use raclette cheese and not just any cheese, and the different types of melting apparatuses and so on. It’s still education, and that’s what makes it so fun.

That’s certainly true. Raclette grills are available at any major retailer, but that’s where the similarities between them and me end, because the big retailers have the raclette grills but none of the accessories, replacement parts, raclette cheeses or the knowledge. I realized that those big retailers are actually not my competitors, they’re educators. The more people learn about raclette or hear about raclette, the more they want to know about it, and that’s when they come to me.

The one important thing for small, niche businesses is that they need to be passionate about what they’re selling. If you’re passionate, your customers realize that, and that builds a trust and confidence in the customer that cannot be replicated by a big retail store. So you need to put yourself in a unique position.

We live in a world where everything is fast-paced and automatically streamlined, and I think my customers appreciate that they can talk to me as a real person. They’re not talking to an AI assistant, and they’re not going through a lengthy phone system to get an answer. That’s important for small businesses with niche products: they have a real person to talk to.
For myself, as we continue to grow, maintaining the personal connection is one of my biggest priorities, but it’s also one of my biggest challenges, because the more business we have, the more time I need to talk to my customers and communicate with them. My main focus is to always stay in direct contact with my customers so I know what they need and what they want.

Media coverage is certainly nice to have. Journalists and customers like to learn about something new, and raclette is still something new and different. Raclette is also incredibly visual. Nowadays so many people who don’t know exactly what raclette is see a reel of melting cheese being scraped off a machine and ask, “What is that?” So media coverage is nice for spreading the word, but the real trust is built afterwards, when people visit the website and read the content. That’s why I still see our website and our customers as the foundation of the business, rather than going too far into social media.

That has really changed over the years. At the beginning you just had to have a website, then later you needed to figure out SEO to optimize it, and now, of course, we’re going into AI search.
When I first started, and I actually still do this, I tried to get in touch with the people who actually know what raclette is. I get a lot of expats from Switzerland, Germany and France who find me and tell me, “I’m so glad I finally found you, because you have these specialty cheeses and the special machines, like the big raclette melters you can’t normally buy in the US.” So I’m trying to meet the customer where the demand is already there. Nowadays I get more and more customers calling and asking for more detailed information.
A little side story: during COVID, several people called and said, “I saw that, and since we can’t go out for dinner, can you tell me more about raclette? Is that something I could do at home with my kids and my grandkids?” It was nice to see that we’re able to reach more and more people.

Actually, I did. I did not expect that at that point, because I was always thinking people have less money, and raclette, yes, it’s food, but it’s also something extra special that you can always go without. But because people didn’t go to restaurants, they were more interested in doing something cool at home.

When you say lasting over decades, that refers to my partnership with TTM, a producer of raclette melters, where you have a half wheel of cheese that you put under a heating element, and once the cheese starts melting you scrape it off. I’ve worked with TTM since 2009 as their US distributor. We work well together because we’re both old school. If we say something, we stick to it, so we don’t need any fancy contracts. I know I’m the US distributor, and that’s it. I don’t have anything in writing, and that has worked for us, and hopefully it will go forward like that.
SOS Fondue is based in Canada and owned by a Swiss gentleman, Gerard Girard. They approached me a couple of years ago because most people who know raclette also know fondue. When one of my friends from Adopt an Alp started working with them as well, we figured it would be a great fit. Gerard and I have very similar views when it comes to ingredient quality. Honestly, I think that’s the point I’m trying to make: we are honest, and we share values. The common thread between TTM, SOS Fondue and Raclette Corner is authenticity.

We sell a lot of cheese. I’m trying to find cheeses that come directly from the Alps, where the farmer who milks the cows still knows the names of the cows. The cheese is made up in the Alps, the cows are outside all the time feeding on grass, there’s no silage feeding, and therefore the cheese is just special. It feels like you can taste the fresh mountain air and the lush meadows. Those kinds of cheeses are really hard to find in the US. Sometimes you can find something that’s called raclette, but, well, what can I say, it’s not my favorite. To go back to your question, raclette cheese is for sure the biggest seller overall.
Then I have the raclette melters, which a lot of restaurants use. I have a lot of restaurant customers who buy the machines from me, and they’re all spreading the word, so we work together on that. I have a web page where you can look up where you can get raclette melted already, and the restaurants that work with me are listed there.

I’m using AI like everybody else to make sure that when I write something, it flows correctly. I always start myself, and then I tweak a little bit. In the past my daughter would do that, and now I’m using AI for it.
All in all, I think AI is both exciting and intimidating, because I need to find out what I, as a specialist, need to do to stay visible with AI. People don’t ask Google anymore, they ask AI, “What’s the best raclette?” How do I make sure Raclette Corner still comes up there and not something else? I think my challenge is really learning how specialists stay visible with AI. I do have some confidence, because my job is to create the most helpful and authoritative content possible so the systems can find me, and that’s something I’ve always been doing.

I love raclette, I love my customers, and I also love educating them. When I started, very few Americans knew about raclette, and watching awareness grow over the years has been very rewarding. Knowing that I helped introduce this fantastic Swiss tradition to the American people makes me kind of proud. But there are still plenty of people who don’t know anything about raclette, and I think I’ll be spreading the raclette word for quite some time going forward.

Thank you for having me. That was great.